
it 




Class _B_£ 4fe3_. 
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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



BOOKS BY MR. KENYON 

IN VERSE 

The Fallen, and Other Poems 

Out of the Shadows 

Songs in All Seasons 

In Realms of Gold 

At the Gate of Dreams 

An Oaten Pipe 

A Little Book of Lullabies 

Poems 

IN PROSE 

Loiterings in Old Fields 



Loiterings in Old Fields 



LITERARY SKETCHES 



By 



JAMES B. KENYON 




NEW YORK : EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & PYE 



THE LIBRARY OF 


GGNGRESS, 


Two CuHiEJ 


Received 


NOV. 5 


1901 


Copyright 


ENTRY 


&Ut. 


l^jol 


CLASS CC XXc, No. 


/ <t (* 


a. f 


COPY 



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<*< 



Copyright by 

EATON & MAINS. 

1901. 



Cover Design by- 
Mae Wallace McCastline. 



• • • * 
' *\ • **•••• » 
• • •• • ••••••* 

. ••• •••••• I •! •*• •*• "« /' 

i • • • •••»•• . « « • • 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Tennyson in New Aspects 7 

II. William Morris— Poet, Socialist, 

and Master of Many Crafts... 51 

III. John Keats 85 

IV. George Eliot 115 

V. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His 

Sister Christina 149 

VI. The Correspondence of James 

Russell Lowell 175 

VII. The Letters of Robert Louis 

Stevenson 211 



I 

TENNYSON IN NEW ASPECTS 



Loiterings in Old Fields 



i 

TENNYSON IN NEW ASPECTS 

Now that the biography of Alfred Ten- 
nyson has been given by his son to the 
world, an accurate portrayal of a great and 
unique personality is made possible to the 
general reading public. Not that the novel 
aspects of Lord Tennyson's character and 
works are new to the elect few who were 
his tried and intimate friends, but that the 
misconceptions of the late laureate's life his- 
tory will finally be removed from the minds 
of those to whom for half a century his 
name has been synonymous with the noblest 
functions of a bard. At length this prince 
of song takes his place in that clear light of 



8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

truth and high renown where to see him 
is to love him for what he was within him- 
self, as well as for what he wrought of profit 
and delight to the world. 

The year 1809 is a memorable one, since 
it records the nativity of Alfred Tennyson, 
William E. Gladstone, Charles Darwin, Ol- 
iver Wendell Holmes, Richard Monckton 
Milnes (Lord Houghton), Edgar A. Poe, 
Abraham Lincoln, Frederic Chopin, and 
Felix Mendelssohn. Few single years in a 
century are so fruitful in greatness. Of 
right Tennyson's name takes its place at 
the head of this list, as he was facile prin- 
ce ps among his compeers. In him the men- 
tal restlessness, the earnest gropings toward 
the solution of moral problems, the almost 
despairing grasp upon the great, isolated, 
undemonstrable verities of the spiritual life, 
the certain yet conservative trend toward 
democracy — all characteristics of the age 
in which he lived — found their mysterious 
junction. He became, more than any other 
eminent thinker of his day, the representa- 
tive voice of his generation. He was in- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 9 

tensely conscious of his prophetic calling, 
being burdened all his life with the sense of 
a divine gift for the proper employment of 
which he must render due account. He was 
wont to say that sometimes the weight of 
his responsibility in this direction became 
well-nigh insupportable. But he never pros- 
tituted his large powers to ignoble ends. 
It might be written of him, as he himself 
wrote of Wordsworth, that he "uttered 
nothing base." 

To preserve unimpaired his poetic talent 
and freedom Tennyson was willing to en- 
dure years of neglect and what was little 
better than poverty. Some of the shifts to 
which he was put before his general recog- 
nition as a great poet were of an almost sor- 
did kind; he rode in third-class passenger 
coaches, scarcely better than cattle cars, and 
when he could not afford to ride he walked. 
He borrowed books because he could not 
afford to buy them, and on the few trips he 
was permitted to take he sought the cheaper 
lodging houses because he could not afford 
to patronize better ones. He did not wed 



io LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

the woman of his choice until many years 
after he had first met and loved her ; and in 
the interval of his poetic silence, when for 
ten years he gave nothing to the public 
which had scoffed at his muse, the engage- 
ment between himself and Miss Sellwood 
was terminated, as there seemed to be no 
prospect that he would ever be able to pro- 
vide for a wife. Yet his high spirit was 
never broken, his manly independence was 
never compromised. 

Alfred Tennyson was extremely fortu- 
nate in his friendships. From the begin- 
ning of his college days to the end of his 
long life he numbered among his friends 
some of the rarest spirits of the century. 
Fine minds gravitated toward him by a kind 
of natural law. Samuel Rogers, Edward 
Fitzgerald, James Spedding, W. E. Glad- 
stone, Frederick D. Maurice, Edward Lear, 
G. F. Watts, Thomas Woolner, Robert 
Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Jow- 
ett, F. T. Palgrave, William Allingham, J. 
M. Kemble, Henry Taylor, John Tyndall, 
Richard Monckton Milnes, G. S. Venables, 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS n 

Aubrey de Vere, W. M. Thackeray, John 
Forster, Henry Hallam, A. H. Clough, Mat- 
thew Arnold, and the Duke of Argyll — 
these were among those whom Tennyson 
knew and loved best. The supreme sorrow 
of his life was in the death of his most 
warmly cherished friend, Arthur Hallam. 
Tennyson's affection for this young man 
was singularly pure and deep. Hallam was 
engaged to Tennyson's sister, and was pos- 
sessed of a subtle and commanding intellect. 
Among his college friends the consensus of 
opinion was that he — Hallam — and not 
Gladstone was the coming great man. When 
Arthur Hallam's life was suddenly termi- 
nated Alfred Tennyson was plunged into 
the profoundest grief. For years he brood- 
ed upon his sorrow, valiantly meeting the 
specters of his own mind and subduing 
them, until out of the stress and anguish of 
that bitter period came "In Memoriam," 
the noblest elegiac poem to be found in any 
language of the world. 

To prepare a just and adequate memoir 
of any eminent person requires a peculiar 



12 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

combination of qualities in the writer there- 
of — complete sympathy with the subject in 
hand, entire familiarity with the biographi- 
cal data accessible, an even and well-bal- 
anced judgment, and unerring taste in the 
selection of material to be presented. In 
Hallam Tennyson's memoir of his illustrious 
father these qualities are combined in pleas- 
ing measure. A quiet reserve is manifest, 
such as characterized the poet himself in 
his attitude toward the public at large, but 
this reticence concerns mainly those more 
private affairs which are sacred to the do- 
mestic life. Yet even here the curtain is 
lifted now and again, affording charming 
glimpses of a great genius off guard and at 
ease in the serenity of the home circle. It 
is not the purpose of the present writer to 
review the two stout octavo volumes in 
which are gathered by filial duty and affec- 
tion the memorials of a rich and exalted life. 
To many who would peruse them with in- 
terest the price of these books will be pro- 
hibitive. Hence are set forth in the follow- 
ing pages such facts as have corrected the 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 13 

writer's own impressions of the late laureate 
and his environment and shed new light on 
some phases of his life and work. 

No man more resented the impertinent 
inquisitiveness of a curiosity-loving public 
than did Alfred Tennyson. This feeling, 
experienced early in life, deepened and in- 
tensified to the end. Its degree may be 
partially determined by the following indig- 
nant lines : 

And you have miss'd the irreverent doom 
Of those that wear the poet's crown ; 
Hereafter, neither knave nor clown 

Shall hold their orgies at your tomb. 

For now the poet cannot die, 
Nor leave his music as of old, 
But round him ere he scarce be cold 

Begins the scandal and the cry ; 

Proclaim the faults he would not show ; 

Break lock and seal ; betray the trust ; 

Keep nothing sacred ; 'tis but just 
The many-headed beast should know. 

The lion-hunting tourist was abhorrent to 

him. He was very nearsighted, and once 

when walking on the downs with a friend 

he saw some sheep which he mistook for 
2 



14 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

tourists making toward him. He turned 
and fled incontinently for home. Tennyson 
desired that his life should be read in his 
published works. His son says: 

Besides the letters of my father and of his friends 
there are his poems, and in these we must look for 
the innermost sanctuary of his being. For my own 
part I feel strongly that no biographer could so 
truly give him as he gives himself in his own works. 
... He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal 
biography, for 

None can truly write his single day, 

And none can write it for him upon earth. 

Alfred Tennyson was born in his father's 
rectory at Somersby in Lincolnshire. The 
"long gray fields," the fens, the sluices, the 
wolds about his early home impressed him 
deeply, and so stimulated his young imagi- 
nation that he almost "lisped in numbers." 
Edward Fitzgerald writes: "I used to say 
Alfred never should have left old Lincoln- 
shire, where there were not only such good 
seas, but also such fine Hill and Dale among 
'the Wolds,' which he was brought up in, 
as people in general scarce thought on." 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS i5 

Alfred was the fourth of twelve children 
born to Rev. George Clayton Tennyson and 
Elizabeth Fytche. There were eight sons 
and four daughters, most of whom, it is 
averred, were more or less true poets. Of 
Alfred's earliest attempt at poetry he says : 

According to the best of my recollection, when I 
was about eight years old I covered two sides of a 
slate with Thomsonian blank verse in praise of 
flowers for my brother Charles, who was a year older 
than I was, Thomson then being the only poet I 
knew. Before I could read I was in the habit on a 
stormy day of spreading my arras to the wind, and 
crying out, "I hear a voice that's speaking in the 
wind," and the words "far, far away" had always a 
strange charm for me. 

The latter statement will be interesting to 
those who recall the poet's beautiful lines 
beginning, "What sight so lured him thro' 
the fields he knew." It was on the lawn 
of the old rectory that Tennyson made his 
early song, "A spirit haunts the year's last 
hours." In his youth the laureate was an 
intense admirer of Lord Byron, whose in- 
fluence is unmistakably revealed in the 
adolescent publication, Poems by Two 



16 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Brothers. On hearing of Byron's death — 
April 19, 1824 — "a day," he says, "when 
the whole world seemed to be darkened for 
me," he carved on a rock the words, "Byron 
is dead." 

Tennyson was well-born. He had the in- 
estimable advantage of good blood and 
right breeding. The poet's father was a 
man of dominating intellect. He was a 
Hebrew and Syriac scholar, and became 
proficient in the Greek language that he 
might teach it to his sons, whom he himself 
prepared for Cambridge. The rector of 
Somersby was endowed with a splendid 
physique, standing six feet two, and was an 
energetic and powerful man. Alfred in- 
herited these noble physical proportions. Of 
the poet's great bodily strength Brookfield 
remarked, "It is not fair, Alfred, that you 
should be Hercules as well as Apollo." In 
proof of his notable muscular power it is 
related that when showing to some friends 
a little pet pony on the lawn at Somersby, 
one day, he surprised the spectators by tak- 
ing it up and carrying it. Fitzgerald said, 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 17 

"Alfred could hurl the crowbar further than 
any of the neighboring clowns, whose hu- 
mors, as well as those of their betters, 
knight, squire, landlord, and lieutenant, he 
took quiet note of, like Chaucer himself." 
Of the tender-heartedness of the poet's 
mother it is recorded that the boys of a 
neighboring village used to bring their dogs 
to Mrs. Tennyson's windows and beat them, 
in order to be bribed to leave off, or to in- 
duce her to buy them. One source of 
amusement at the rectory was "the writing 
of tales in letter form to be placed under 
the vegetable dishes at dinner, and read 
aloud when it was over." It is stated that 
the future laureate's tales "were very vari- 
ous in theme, some of them humorous and 
some savagely dramatic," and that his broth- 
ers and sisters "looked to him as their most 
thrilling story-teller." 

Though much ill-advised criticism was 
passed upon Tennyson at the time of his 
elevation to the peerage, the poet was a 
Tory by right of birth. His views of de- 
mocracy were always of a conservative na- 



i8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

ture. This conservatism is well illustrated 
by his oft-repeated praises of the restrictive 
character of the fifth article of the Ameri- 
can Constitution. Regard for the rights 
and duties of birth beat in the laureate's 
blood. Tennyson's mother was Elizabeth 
Fytche. ''The Fytches were a county fam- 
ily of old descent. The first name on the 
Fytche pedigree is John Fitch of Fitch 
castle in the North, who died in the twenty- 
fifth year of Edward I. His descendant, 
Thomas Fitch, was knighted by Charles II, 
1679, served the office of high sheriff in 
Kent, and was created baronet September 
7, 1688." 

Probably no poet's muse ever brought 
him more substantial returns than did that 
of Alfred Tennyson, though the amount 
which he received per annum for his literary 
work has been much overrated. His in- 
come from his published works was never 
more than six thousand pounds a year, and 
during the latter years of his life was much 
less than that. The first money which he 
earned by his compositions was when, at 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 19 

his grandfather's desire, he wrote a poem 
on the death of his grandmother. The old 
gentleman presented him a half guinea with 
the remark, "Here is a half guinea for you, 
the first you have ever earned by poetry, 
and take my word for it, the last." 

Alfred Tennyson matriculated at Trinity 
College, Cambridge, February 20, 1828. 
There his brother, Frederick Tennyson, was 
already a distinguished scholar. Alfred's 
friends and intimates at college were Sped- 
ding, author of the life of Bacon; Milnes 
(Lord Houghton), Trench (afterward 
Archbishop of London), Alford (afterward 
Dean of Canterbury), Brookfield, Blakes- 
ley (afterward Dean of Lincoln), Thomp- 
son, S. S. Rice, Merivale (afterward Dean 
of Ely), J. M. Kemble, Heath (senior 
wrangler 1832), Charles Buller, Monteith, 
Tennant, and A. H. Hallam. Here Tenny- 
son moved as a highly esteemed equal 
among the brainiest of his associates. His 
personal peculiarities were respected, and 
the development of his genius was hailed 
with delight. The poet says, "I kept a tame 



20 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

snake in my rooms. I liked to watch his 
wonderful sinuosities on the carpet." The 
following verses on "The Moon," written at 
this period, show that the unique Tennyson 
style had even then been formed: 

Deep glens I found, and sunless gulfs, 
Set round with many a toppling spire, 

And monstrous rocks from craggy mounts, 
Disploding globes of roaring fire. 

Large as a human eye the sun 

Drew down the West his feeble lights ; 

And then a night, all moons, confused 
The shadows from the icy heights. 

Of the society of the "Apostles," an associa- 
tion of kindred spirits, Tennyson was an 
early member. "On stated evenings," says 
Carlyle, "was much logic, and other spirit- 
ual fencing, and ingenuous collision — prob- 
ably of a really superior quality in that 
kind ; for not a few of the then disputants 
have since proved themselves men of parts, 
and attained distinction in the intellectual 
walks of life." In this society of the 
"Apostles" were discussed such questions 
as the following : "Have Shelley's poems an 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 21 

immoral tendency?" Tennyson votes ''No." 
"Is an intelligible First Cause deducibl'e 
from the phenomena of the universe?" Ten- 
nyson votes "No." "Is there any rule of 
moral action beyond general expediency?" 
Tennyson votes "Aye." Tennant writing 
to Tennyson says : 

Last Saturday we had an Apostolic dinner, when 
we had the honor among other things of drinking 
your health. Edmund Lushington and I went away 
tolerably early, but most of them stayed till past two. 
John Heath volunteered a song ; Kemble got into a 
passion about nothing, but quickly jumped out 
again ; Blakesley was afraid the proctor might come 
in ; and Thompson poured large quantities of salt 
upon Douglas Heath's head, because he talked non- 
sense. 

While yet in college Tennyson seems to 
have anticipated in effect the theory of evo- 
lution, which in later years was generally 
associated with the name of Charles Dar- 
win. Tennyson says that "the development 
of the human body might possibly be traced 
from the radiated, vermicular, molluscous, 
and vertebrate organisms." 

In 1830 the volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyr- 



22 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

ical, was greeted with the appreciative ap- 
plause of a small chorus of admiring 
friends. They prophesied the author's com- 
ing eminence, but the great world was in- 
different. The previous year Arthur Hallam 
had written to W. E. Gladstone, "I con- 
sider Tennyson as promising fair to be the 
greatest poet of our generation.'' In 183 1, 
after the death of Tennyson's father, when 
it appeared that the family were about to 
remove from Somersby, Arthur Hallam in 
a spirit of prophecy wrote to Emily Ten- 
nyson, to whom he had been attached for 
about two years : 

Many years, perhaps, or shall I say many ages, 
after we all have been laid in dust, young lovers of 
the beautiful and the true may seek in faithful pil- 
grimage the spot where Alfred's mind was molded in 
silent sympathy with the everlasting forms of na- 
ture* Legends will perhaps be attached to the places 
that are near it Some Mariana, it will be said, 
lived wretched and alone in a dreary house on the 
top of the opposite hill. Some Isabel may with more 
truth be sought nearer yet. The belfry in which the 
white owl sat "warming his five wits" will be shown 
for sixpence to such travelers as have lost their 
own. Critic after critic will track the wanderings 
of the brook, or mark groupings of elm and poplar, 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 23 

in order to verify the "Ode to Memory," in its mi- 
nutest particulars. 

At this time Tennyson's simple and abound- 
ing gladness merely to be alive is well ex- 
pressed in a certain sonnet entitled "Life." 

Why suffers human life so soon eclipse? 
For I could burst into a psalm of praise, 
Seeing the heart so wondrous in her ways, 
E'en scorn looks beautiful on human lips! 
"Would I could pile fresh life on life, and dull 
The sharp desire of knowledge still with knowing ! 
Art, science, nature, everything is full, 
As my own soul is full, to overflowing — 
Millions of forms, and hues, and shades, that give 
The difference of all things to the sense, 
And all the likeness in the difference. 
I thank thee, God, that thou hast made me live : 
I reck not for the sorrow or the strife : 
One only joy I know, the joy of life. 

At Cambridge the "Palace of Art" was 
passed about in manuscript among an elect 
few, who admired it according to its deserts. 
In 1832 Tennyson gave to the world an- 
other volume of poems which, despite the 
high expectations of his friends, was but 
coldly received by the general public. The 
Quarterly Revieiv was very savage in its 



24 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

onslaught upon the poet. In vain his friends 
endeavored to cheer him by telling him 
that "his very creative originality and un- 
likeness to any poet, his uncommon power 
over varied meters and rare harmonies of 
sound and sense, needed the creation of a 
taste for his work before he could be appre- 
ciated." An old Lincolnshire squire, how- 
ever, expressed the estimation in which the 
Quarterly was generally held when he said 
to Tennyson that the Quarterly "was the 
next book to God's Bible." After the publi- 
cation of the 1832 volume ten years elapsed 
before the poet again addressed the reading 
world. Tennyson was deeply discouraged. 
He fancied that England was an uncon- 
genial atmosphere, and began to think of 
living abroad in Jersey, in the south of 
France, or in Italy. "He was so far per- 
suaded that the English people would never 
care for his poetry that, had it not been for 
the intervention of friends, he declared it 
not unlikely that after the death of Hallam 
he would not have continued to write." 
The last letter which Tennyson received 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 25 

from his friend Hallam contained these 
manuscript lines : 

I do but mock me with the questionings. 

Dark, dark, irrecoverably dark 

Is the soul's eye ; yet how it strives and battles 

Through the impenetrable gloom to fix 

That master light, the secret truth of things, 

Which is the body of the Infinite God. 

Arthur Hallam died at Vienna, September 
J 5> ^SS- When his father returned from 
his usual daily walk he saw Arthur asleep, 
as he supposed, upon the couch. A blood 
vessel near the brain had suddenly burst ; 
the young man was not asleep, but dead. 
The germ of that great threnody, "In Me- 
moriam" — the one adequate and matchless 
elegy in any language — appears in the fol- 
lowing fragment: 

Where is the voice I loved? ah, where 
Is that dear hand that I would press? 

Lo ! the broad heavens, cold and bare, 
The stars that know not my distress ! 

The vapor labors up the sky, 

Uncertain forms are darkly moved ! 

Larger than human passes by 
The shadow of the man I loved, 

And clasps his hands, as one that prays ! 



26 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Under the shadow of this great loss and 
sorrow was begun the poem entitled "The 
Two Voices." The poet was most exacting 
as to his art. It is said that "The Brook" 
was actually rescued from the waste-paper 
heap. His fine sense of proportion caused 
him to elide from "The Two Voices" so 
excellent a stanza as this : 

From when his baby pulses beat 
To when his hands in their last heat 
Pick at the death-mote in the sheet. 

To adverse criticism Tennyson was sensi- 
tive in an extreme degree ; not, he declared, 
so far as his art was concerned, but because 
of the petty personal spites and wretched 
meannesses disclosed. On the other hand, 
intelligent praise instantly gave him encour- 
agement, and a favorable review from far- 
off Calcutta could so brace the poet's spirits 
as to make him warm to his work. We are 
told that the localities of Tennyson's sub- 
ject poems are wholly imaginary. He him- 
self says of "The Miller's Daughter," which 
was much altered and enlarged from the 
edition of 1832, "The mill was no particular 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 27 

mill ; if I thought at all of any mill, it was 
that of Trumpington near Cambridge." 

The grandfather desired to make parsons 
of all the Tennyson brothers, but only one — 
Charles — fulfilled this pious wish. Charles 
and Alfred married sisters, daughters of 
Henry Sellwood, Esq. Arthur Hallam, who 
was visiting at Somersby rectory, asked 
Emily Sellwood to walk with him in the 
Fairy Wood. At a turn of the path they 
came upon Alfred Tennyson, "who, at the 
sight of the slender, beautiful girl of seven- 
teen in her simple gray dress, moving 'like 
a light across the woodland ways,' suddenly 
said to her, 'Are you a dryad or an oread 
wandering here?' " The long-dreaded sep- 
aration from Somersby took place in 1837. 
After this the Tennysons flitted several 
times, first to High Beech in Epping Forest, 
then to Tunbridge Wells, thence to Boxley 
near Maidstone. In 1839 the poet wrote to 
Emily Sellwood, his future wife: "Perhaps 
I am coming to the Lincolnshire coast, but 
I scarcely know. The journey is so expen- 
sive and I am so poor." Again, "I shall 



28 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

never see the Eternal City, nor that dome, 
the wonder of the world; I do not think I 
would live there if I could, and I have no 
money for touring." After 1840 all corre- 
spondence between Alfred Tennyson and 
Emily Sellwood was forbidden, since there 
seemed to be no prospect of their ever being 
married, owing to a perpetual want of 
funds. The poet was forty-one years old 
when he at length found it possible to wed 
the woman of his choice. Not until that 
time did his poems bring him even a limited 
competency. His courtship was a long ro- 
mance of hope, and patience, and trust. In 
after years he said of his bride, ''The peace 
of God came into my life before the altar 
when I wedded her." She was the poet's 
earliest and latest critic, to whose judg- 
ment he always deferred. Their domestic 
life was supremely happy, and of the wife 
some of her friends were wont to say, "She 
is as great as Alfred." As an illustration 
of her character Jowett was told by Tenny- 
son that his wife once said, "When I pray 
I see the face of God smiling upon me." 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 29 

Tennyson's memory of his mother, whose 
portrait he has so beautifully drawn in "The 
Princess," and the poet's gentle and lovely 
wife increased, if possible, his natural chiv- 
alry toward women. Before his marriage 
lie thus writes to Miss Sellwood: "A good 
woman is a wondrous creature, cleaving to 
the right and the good in all change, lovely 
in her youthful comeliness, lovely all her 
life long in comeliness of heart." To a 
friend he said, "I would pluck my hand 
from a man, even if he were my greatest 
hero, or dearest friend, if he wronged a 
woman, or told her a lie." 

We learn that it was in the latter part of 
1837, or the beginning of 1838, that Tenny- 
son appears to have first become known in 
America. About that time Ralph Waldo 
Emerson somehow made acquaintance with 
the 1830 and 1832 volumes, and delighted 
in lending them to his friends. In Novem- 
ber, 1850, after the death of Wordsworth, 
Alfred Tennyson was appointed poet- 
laureate. The appointment was owing 
chiefly to Prince Albert's admiration for 



30 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

"In Memoriam." From this time onward 
more prosperous days began to dawn upon 
him. Previously, because of straitened cir- 
cumstances, he had ridden in third-class 
railway carriages, and had complained that 
it was "expensive being at an inn." Six 
years later, upon the publication of "Maud," 
of which thirty thousand copies were sold 
immediately, he was enabled to purchase 
with the proceeds of the sale of that poem 
the beautiful home at "Farringford" in the 
Isle of Wight. What other poet, of this or 
any former century, was possessed of two 
such homes as "Farringford" and "Aid- 
worth"? 

Perhaps we may again advert to the sense- 
less outcry which was raised when Tenny- 
son accepted a place in the House of Lords. 
In reply to a letter from Gladstone upon the 
subject the poet wrote : 

I speak frankly to you when T say that I had 
rather we should remain plain "Mr." and "Mrs." 
and that, if it were possible, the title should first be 
assumed by our son at any age it may be thought 
right to fix upon ; but, like enough, this is against 
all precedent, and could not be managed ; and on no 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 31 

account would I have suggested it were there the 
least chance of the queen's construing it into a slight 
of the proffered honor. I hope that I have too much 
of the old-world loyalty left in me not to wear my 
lady's favors against all comers, should you think 
that it would be more agreeable to her majesty that 
I should do so. 

It was with reluctance that Tennyson final- 
ly accepted a barony, after a baronetcy had 
been three times previously urged upon him. 
He makes his own position sufficiently clear 
in the following lines to a friend : 

Why should I be selfish and not suffer an honor — 
as Gladstone says — to be done to literature in my 
name? For myself I felt, especially in the dark 
days that may be coming on, that a peerage might 
possibly be more of a disadvantage than an advantage 
to my sons ; I cannot tell. I have been worried be- 
cause, being of a nervous, sensitive nature, I wished 
as soon as possible to get over the disagreeable re- 
sults, and the newspaper comments and abuse. 

Tennyson's political utterances are among 
the wisest of his time. He was deeply in- 
terested in the politics of the world, partic- 
ularly whatever affected his own country. 
Speaking of England and Ireland, he said : 

The Celtic race does not easily amalgamate with 
other races, as those of Scandinavian origin do, as 



32 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

for instance Saxon and Norman, which have fused 
perfectly. The Teuton has no poetry in his nature 
like the Celt, and this makes the Celt much more 
dangerous in politics, for he yields more to his im- 
agination than his common sense. Yet his imag- 
ination does not allow of his realizing the sufferings 
of poor dumb beasts. The Irish are difficult for us 
to deal with. For one thing the English do not un- 
derstand their innate love of fighting, words and 
blows. If on cither side of an Irishman's road to 
paradise shillalahs grew, which automatically hit 
him on the head, yet he would not be satisfied. Sup- 
pose that we allowed Ireland to separate from us ; 
owing to its factions she would soon fall a prey to 
some foreign power. She has absolute freedom now, 
and a more than full share in the government of one 
of the mightiest empires in the world. Whatever she 
may. say, she is not only feudal, but oriental, and 
loves those in authority over her to have the iron 
hand in the silken glove. Let the demagogues re- 
member, "Liberty forgetful of others is license, and 
nothing better than treason." ... It was the mob 
who smashed the Duke of Wellington's windows on 
the anniversary of Waterloo. As Goethe says, "The 
worst thing in the world is ignorance in motion." 

He thus writes to Walt Whitman regarding 
the American Constitution : 

The coming year should give new life to every 
American who has breathed a breath of that soul 
which inspired the great founders of the American 
Constitution, whose work you are to celebrate. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 33 

Truly, the mother country, pondering on this, may 
feel that how much soever the daughter owes to her 
she, the mother, has nevertheless something to learn 
from the daughter. Especially I would note the 
care taken to guard a noble Constitution from rash 
and unwise innovators. . . . Every agitator should 
be made to prove his means of livelihood. 

Once more: 

We ought not to show our arsenals and dockyards 
to the world, as we do. Want of confidence is hate- 
ful among members of a family, but want of confi- 
dence is necessary among nations. 

The earliest memorandum for the King 
Arthur epics is extremely interesting. In 
it the poet says: "Two Guineveres. Y e 
first prim. Christianity. 2 d Roman Cathol- 
icism. Y e first is put away and dwells apart. 
2 d Guinevere flies. Arthur takes to the first 
again, but finds her changed by lapse of 
time." For thirty years Tennyson medi- 
tated the Arthurian poems. Like Milton 
before him, he had early been impressed by 
the legend of King Arthur, and intended to 
weave it into a new form. In viaw of the 
various interpretations which have been put 
upon the "Idylls of the King" the poet's 



34 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

own explanation of them is of value. "The 
whole/' he said, "is the dream of man com- 
ing into practical life and ruined by one sin. 
Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery, 
and in the midst lies the table-land of life 
and its struggles and performances. It is 
not the history of one man or of one govern- 
ment, but of a whole cycle of generations." 
Alfred Tennyson was always reverent 
toward revealed religion and respectful 
toward its ministers. He said of the Bible 
that it "ought to be read, were it only for 
the sake of the grand English in which it is 
written, an education in itself." Once in a 
serious illness he said of the Book of Job 
that he thought it "one of the greatest of 
books," and asked to have read to him the 
"little children, love one another" passage 
from St. John, and also the Sermon on the 
Mount, for which he possessed a measure- 
less admiration. His attitude toward Christ 
was that of an old saint or mystic. It was 
his opinion that "The Son of Man" was 
"the most tremendous title possible;" and 
that the "most pathetic utterance in all his- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 35 

tory was that of Christ on the cross, 'It is 
finished/ after that passionate cry, 'My 
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me?" : Said he, "Indeed, what matters it 
how much man knows and does, if he keeps 
not a reverential looking upward? He is 
only the subtlest beast in the field." It was 
thus he regarded prayer : "Prayer is, to take 
a mundane simile, like opening a sluice be- 
tween the great ocean and our little chan- 
nels when the great sea gathers itself to- 
gether and flows in at full tide. . . . Prayer 
on our part is the highest aspiration of the 
soul." He discoursed much with his friends 
on religious questions, and of Christianity 
observed, "It is tugging at my heart." He 
further said : 

Almost the finest summing up of religion is to do 
justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. 
. . . Take away the sense of individual responsi- 
bility, and men sink into pessimism and madness. 
. . . Man's free will is but a bird in the cage ; he can 
stop at the lower perch, or he can mount to a higher. 
Then that which is and knows will enlarge his cage, 
give him a higher and higher perch, and at last break 
off the top of his cage, and let him out to be one 
with the free will of the universe. ... It is motive, 



36 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

it is the great purpose, which consecrates life. The 
real test of a man is not what he knows, but what he 
is in himself and in his relation to others. For in- 
stance, can he battle against his own bad inherited 
instincts, or brave public opinion in the cause of 
truth? The love of God is the true basis of duty, 
truth, reverence, loyalty, love, virtue, and work. I 
believe in these, although I feel the emptiness and 
hollowness of much of life. "Be ye perfect as your 
Father in heaven is perfect." . . . Evil must come 
upon us headlong, if morality tries to get on without 
religion. . . . Beware of breaking up the soil of any 
faith when you have no better seed to sow. ... I 
dread the losing hold of forms. I have expressed 
this in my "Akbar." There must be forms, yet I 
hate the need for so many sects and separate services. 

His faith in a divine Personality was abso- 
lute, as many rememberable utterances 
testify : 

I should infinitely rather feel myself the most mis- 
erable wretch on the face of the earth with a God 
above than the highest type of a man standing alone. 
. . . The soul seems to me one with God. I can 
sympathize with God in my poor little way. ... It 
is hard to believe in God ; but it is harder not to be- 
lieve. I believe in God, not from what I see in na- 
ture, but from what I find in man. . . . Love is the 
highest we feel, therefore we must believe that "God 
is love." We cannot but believe that the creation is 
infinite, if God is infinite. ... I believe that God 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 37 

reveals himself in every individual soul ; and my idea 
of heaven is perpetual ministry of one soul to an- 
other. 

In April, 1886, the poet was called upon 
to enter the deep waters of an overwhelm- 
ing sorrow in the death of his son Lionel, 
who passed away on shipboard as he was 
returning from India, and was buried in 
the Red Sea. It is written of this son that 
from his "earliest childhood his had always 
been an affectionate and beautiful nature. " 
The faith which the laureate had so long 
cherished in the immortality of the soul now 
afforded him supreme solace. His utter- 
ances touching this great subject are as 
trenchant as they are wise. He came much 
into contact with the agnosticism of the day, 
but never for a moment loosed his grasp of 
the eternal hope. He declared the after- 
life to be the cardinal part of Christ's teach- 
ing. When Tyndall once said to him, "God 
and spirit I know, and matter I know; and 
I believe in both," remarking further, "we 
may all be absorbed into the Godhead," 
Tennyson replied, "Suppose that he is the 



38 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

real person, and we are only relatively per- 
sonal." He was interested to learn that 
Tyndall was convinced that life could not 
originate without life. In a manuscript note 
upon his poem "Vastness" he has recorded 
the following: "What matters anything in 
this world without full faith in the immor- 
tality of the soul and of love?" In a letter 
to the queen he writes: "As to the suffer- 
ings of this momentary life, we can but trust 
that in some after state, when we see 
clearer, we shall thank the Supreme Power 
for having made us, through these, higher 
and greater beings." A lady whose friend 
he had been from her childhood he thus 
consoles upon the loss of her son : 

The son whom you so loved is not really what we 
call dead, but more actually living than when alive 
here. You cannot catch the voice, or feel the hands, 
or kiss the cheeks, that is all ; a separation for an 
hour, not an eternal farewell. If it were not so that 
which made us would seem too cruel a power to be 
worshiped, and could not be loved. 

He addresses the following words to Lord 
Houghton on the death of the latter's wife : 
"I may say that I think I can see, as far as 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 39 

anyone can see in this twilight, that the 
nobler nature does not pass from its indi- 
viduality when it passes out of this one life." 
As a dramatic writer Tennyson will be 
esteemed more highly with the lapse of time. 
When his plays first appeared almost with- 
out exception they were decried by all ex- 
cept a few special friends. The "general," 
to whom "Harold," "May," and "Becket" 
were "caviare," seemed to resent his put- 
ting aside his character as a lyric and epic 
poet to become a dramatist. Yet his dramas 
were admired by such rare judges of lit- 
erary excellence as James Spedding, George 
H. Lewes, and George Eliot. Tennyson 
knew when his work was good and was 
willing that it should wait for the ratifica- 
tion of time. Said he: "Thank God, the 
time is past for the press to make or mar a 
poem, play, or artist. Few original things 
are well received at first. People must grow 
accustomed to what is out of the common 
before adopting it." From bitter moods of 
despondency the poet was preserved by a 
quiet and sometimes grim sense of humor 



40 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

and of the dramatic aspect of things. He 
used to tell with delight of Aubrey de 
Vere's view of eternal punishment: "Of 
course it will be listening to Huxley and 
Tyndall disputing eternally on the nonexist- 
ence of God." 

Throughout his life the laureate was an 
idealist of the noblest type. He dwelt ha- 
bitually in the region of rare and beautiful 
fancies, yet his outlook upon life was ever 
sane and just. He never for a moment 
failed to discern the unity of the highest art 
and the highest morality. Said he: 

"I agree with Wordsworth that art is selection. 
Look at Zola, for instance : he shows the evils of the 
world without the ideal. His art becomes mon- 
strous therefore, because he does not practice selec- 
tion. In the noblest genius there is need of self- 
restraint." "The moral higher imagination enslaved 
to sense is like an eagle caught by the feet in a snare, 
baited with carrion, so that it cannot use its wings to 
soar." 

His final views concerning woman and her 
relation to the world did not differ from 
those so luminously set forth in "The 
Princess." One of his latest dicta was: 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 41 

"Especially do I want people to recognize 
that the women of our western hemisphere 
represent the highest type of women, great- 
ly owing to the respect and honor paid to 
them by men, but that the moment the honor 
and respect are diminished the high type of 
woman will vanish." That the loftiest in- 
spirations belong to the ideal world he de- 
clared when he said, "Poetry is truer than 
fact." We are told that with passionate 
earnestness he once spoke: "Yes, it is true 
that there are moments when the flesh is 
nothing to me, when I feel and know the 
flesh to be the vision, God and the spiritual 
the only real and true. Depend upon it, the 
spiritual is the real ; it belongs to one more 
than the hand and the foot." 

Tennyson was an incessant reader in all 
directions — travels, astronomy, natural 
science, philosophy, and theology. His lit- 
erary taste was of a most catholic nature, 
He kept abreast of the literary development 
of his time, and read Stevenson, George 
Meredith, Walter Besant, Black, Hardy, 
Henry James, Marion Crawford, Anstey, 



42 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Barrie, Blackmore, Conan Doyle, Miss Brad- 
don, Miss Lawless, Ouida, Miss Broughton, 
Lady Margaret Majendie, Edna Lyall, Mrs. 
Oliphant, Hall Caine, and J. H. Shorthouse. 
His observations concerning men and books 
were as trenchant as they were true : 

"Keats is not a master of blank verse." He "prom- 
ised securely more than any other English poet since 
Milton." "Byron's merits are on the surface. This 
is not the case with Wordsworth. You must love 
Wordsworth ere he will seem worthy of your love." 
"Browning never greatly cares about the glory of 
words or beauty of form. . . . He has plenty of mu- 
sic in him, but he cannot get it out." 

Of George Eliot's novels he liked best Adam 
Bede, Scenes of Clerical Life, and Silas 
Marner. Romola he thought somewhat out 
of her depth. 

Alfred Tennyson was characterized by 
the utmost simplicity of life. He loved Na- 
ture in her every mood, and she took him 
to her inmost heart. It is recorded of him 
that "throughout the winter he fed the 
thrushes and other birds as usual out of 
his window." Nor was he a recluse, but on 
the contrary an extremely hospitable man. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 43 

He generally urged a parting guest's return 
with the words, "Come whenever you like." 
Though relentlessly pursued by curiosity 
hunters, and apparently sometimes abrupt 
and brusque, he was really a patient and 
tolerant man. One day an American sud- 
denly appeared at Aldworth, saying that he 
had worked his way across the Atlantic in 
a cattle ship in order to recite "Maud" to 
the author thereof. The poet pitied the 
man, listened to the recitation, and paid the 
reciter's passage back to America. 

Tennyson was an artificer in words. The 
glory and the value of language afforded 
him perpetual satisfaction. It was his cus- 
tom to express in a line or two awe-in- 
spiring and beautiful phases of natural phe- 
nomena ; these lines were written down in 
notebooks and afterward duly and fittingly 
incorporated in poems now familiar to the 
world. It has been well said that "The 
Talking Oak" is an example of Tennyson's 
unusual power of humanizing external na- 
ture and of investing it with the feelings 
and attributes of human kind. It is inter- 



44 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

esting to know' on the authority of the 
laureate himself, that the lines, 

I held it truth with him who sings 
To one clear harp in divers tones, 

have reference to Goethe, for whom Ten- 
nyson entertained an abiding admiration. 

Though the poet was excessively shy in 
the presence of strangers, when the strange- 
ness had worn away his companionship was 
delightful. One of his friends speaks of his 
"gay, boyish humor, the sunny sweetness, 
the delight in life that never failed." Jow- 
ett says: 

His repertory of stories was perfectly inexhaust- 
ible ; they were often about slight matters that would 
scarcely bear repetition, but were told with such life- 
like reality that they convulsed his hearers with 
laughter. Like most story-tellers, he often repeated 
his favorites ; but, like children, his audience liked 
hearing them again and again, and he enjoyed telling 
them. It might be said of him that he told more 
stories than anyone, but was by no means the reg- 
ular story-teller. In the commonest conversation he 
showed himself a man of genius. 

Tennyson's conversation was of so rich and 
varied a kind and the choiceness of his Ian- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 45 

guage was such that Fitzgerald once de- 
clared, "I wish I had been A. T.'s Boswell." 
In his domestic life the poet was happy be- 
yond measure. He greeted his friends with- 
in the portals of his home with a cordiality 
and unaffected courtesy possible only to a 
great nature. There, upon request, to rapt 
listeners he would read his poems in that 
full organ-voice of which Carlyle once re- 
marked, "It is like the sound of a pine- 
wood." Edmund Lushington also speaks 
of "the deep melodious thunder" of the 
laureate's voice. His reading of "Guine- 
vere" once made George Eliot weep. Ten- 
nyson's heart was ever tender and kind, and 
moved by the most precious instincts of the 
race. Of vivisection he said : 

Without anaesthetics no animal should be cut open 
for the sake of science. I have been reading of the 
horrible and brutal experiments in Italy and France, 
and my whole heart goes out to a certain writer in 
the Spectator, who declared he had yet to find out 
mankind was worth the cruel torture of a single 
dumb animal. 

He writes to Mary Howitt concerning the 

household affections : "I wish that we Eng- 
4 



46 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

landers dealt more in such symbols, that we 
dressed our affections up in a little more 
poetical costume; real warmth of heart 
would lose nothing, rather gain by it. As 
it is, our manners are as cold as the walls 
of our churches." 

Lord Tennyson was a man of wide learn- 
ing. He was familiar with the Greek, Lat- 
in, Hebrew, German, and Italian languages, 
and had some acquaintance with the Persian. 
He was young in heart to the very last, as 
all great genius has ever been. One of his 
favorite sayings was, "Make the lives of 
children as beautiful and as happy as possi- 
ble." His was an ingenuous and confiding 
nature, unworldly in the sense that in 
thought he abode in pure regions above the 
sordid things of life. At least one of his 
friends has said that his entire trustfulness 
was sometimes almost pathetic. His per- 
sonal appearance was such as to command 
attention wherever he might be. The fol- 
lowing is Carlyle's portrait of the poet : 

Some weeks ago, one night, the poet Tennyson and 
Matthew Allen were discovered here smoking in the 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 47 

garden. Tennyson had been here before, but was 
still new to Jane, who was alone for the first hour or 
two of it. A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze- 
colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred ; dusty, smoky, 
free and easy ; who swims outwardly and inwardly, 
with great composure in an articulate element as of 
tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke ; great now and 
then when he does emerge ; a most restful, brotherly, 
solid-hearted man. 

Mrs. Carlyle's portrait of the poet is equally 
vivid and characteristic: 

Get his [Tennyson's] poems if you can, and read 
the "Ulysses," "Dora," the "Vision of Sin," and you 
will find that we do not overrate him. Besides, he 
is a very handsome man, and a noble-hearted one, 
with something of the gypsy in his appearance, which 
for me is perfectly charming. Babbie never saw 
him, unfortunately, or perhaps I should say fortu- 
nately, for she must have fallen in love with him on 
the spot, unless she be made absolutely of ice ; and 
then men of genius have never anything to keep 
wives upon. 

A delineation by still another hand affords 
us an additional impression of the poet's 
uniqueness and individuality : 

I saw a tall, large figure, cloak and large black 
wide-awake. He had no beard or mustache. I rec- 
ollect being impressed with the beauty and power 



4 8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

of his mouth and chin. His face is full of power 
and thought ; a deep furrow runs from nose to chin 
on either side, and gives a peculiar expression to the 
face ; a lofty forehead adds to this. I remember the 
splendor of his eyes. 

A great personality is always, in an ap- 
preciable degree, an accurate embodiment 
of the age in which he lives. Thus Tenny- 
son gave voice to the unrest, the forebod- 
ings, the conquests, the questionings, and 
the aspirations of this transitional century. 
Though he heard "the sullen Lethe rolling 
doom" on all things here, the world will not 
permit his name to perish while manhood, 
faith, and duty, and the love of the good, 
the beautiful, and the true, are cherished 
among our kind. As Froude has said, the 
world will not soon see such another, for 
the modern unquiet, impatient Zeitgeist is 
against the production of any such great 
meditative spirit. In the Pantheon of Eng- 
land's glory and renown, "where the huge 
minster's shadowy arches soar," there rests 
no more sacred dust than that of Alfred 
Tennyson. 



II 

WILLIAM MORRIS— POET, 

SOCIALIST, AND MASTER 

OF MANY CRAFTS 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 5i 



II 

WILLIAM MORRIS— POET, SOCIALIST, 
AND MASTER OF MANY CRAFTS 

Could that blithe old singer of the 
"breathing morn/' from his pleasant "lodge 
within a park," come stepping briskly along 
our noisy nineteenth-century ways, bring- 
ing with him the scent of English fields, 
and notes of mavis and of merle — could 
Geoffrey Chaucer with ruddy cheeks, kind- 
ly eyes, and pointed beard, his flowing locks 
surmounted by a sheepskin cap, appear sud- 
denly to our weary eyes with all the buoy- 
ancy of his own fresh day — even outward- 
ly he might not differ greatly from that 
virile and sturdy figure which, to the pres- 
ent generation, has been known as William 
Morris. As story-tellers Geoffrey Chaucer 
and William Morris are akin. Ancient 
Woodstock and modern Kelmscott meet 
where these minstrels chant. Although in 
art Chaucer and Morris are closely related, 



52 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

in the products of their pens they are no- 
tably dissimilar. 

William Morris was of Welsh extraction. 
He was the eldest son of his parents, and 
was born in the village of Walthamstow, 
Essex, on March 24, 1834. He himself says 
in News from Nowhere: "I was born and 
bred on the edge of Epping Forest, Wal- 
thamstow and Woodford, to wit. ... A 
pretty place, too, a very jolly place, now 
that the trees have had time to grow again 
since the great clearing of houses in 1855." 
In the same work he speaks of the lovely 
river Lee, "where old Izaak Walton used to 
fish about the places called Stratford and 
Old Ford." In a letter to The Daily Chron- 
icle he says of Epping Forest: "When I 
was a boy and young man I knew it yard 
by yard from Wanstead to the Theydons, 
and from Hale End to Fairlop Oak. In 
those days it had no worse foes than the 
gravel stealer and the robbing fence-maker, 
and was always interesting and often very 
beautiful." 

Morris's artistic sense developed early. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 53 

It is recorded that as a boy of nine years, 
with a pony of his own, he rode half Essex 
over in search of old churches. So deep 
an impression did the results of these re- 
searches make upon his mind that, after an 
interval of many years, he could remember 
the details of a building which he had not 
seen since his boyhood. It was from Sir 
Walter Scott that Morris imbibed his first 
taste for art and romance. At the early 
age of seven he had read nearly, if not quite, 
all of Scott's works ; and it was the "Wizard 
of the North" who taught him the love of 
Gothic architecture. He says : 

How well I remember as a boy my first acquaint- 
ance with a room hung with faded greenery at Queen 
Elizabeth's Lodge, by Chingford Hatch, in Epping 
Forest, and the impression of romance it made upon 
me ! A feeling that always comes back to me when 
I read, as I often do, Sir Walter Scott's Antiquary, 
and come to the description of the green room at 
Monkbarns, amongst which the novelist has with 
such exquisite cunning of art imbedded the fresh and 
glittering verses of the summer poet Chaucer. 

Morris was educated at Marlborough un- 
der clerical masters, against whom, he re- 



54 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

marks, he naturally rebelled. The loose 
discipline of the place allowed him full 
scope for the cultivation of his individual 
tastes and pursuits. He was not more than 
fourteen years of age when the first general 
appearance took place, before the public, 
of the Preraphaelites, the radical doctrine 
of whom was naturalism as distinguished 
from realism. But the time was not yet 
ripe for Morris to come under their influ- 
ence, nor was he ever formally enrolled in 
their ranks. Says Aymer Vallance : 

It is, therefore, a supreme achievement of William 
Morris to have brought art, through the medium of 
the handicrafts, within reach of thousands who 
could never hope to obtain but a transitory view of 
Preraphaelite pictures ; his distinction, by decorating 
the less pretending, but not less necessary, articles of 
household furnishing, to have done more than any 
other man in the present century to beautify the 
plain, everyday home life of the people. 

On the second of June, 1852, Morris 
matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford. 
This was an event of first-rate importance 
in his life. Edward Burne- Jones matricu- 
lated on the same day at the same college. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 55 

The two freshmen were drawn together by 
ties of sympathy and friendship that re- 
mained unbroken until the day of Morris's 
death. At this time Morris began to be 
conscious of the poise and strength of his 
own life, and to become intensely interested 
in the origin and characteristics of mediaeval 
art. Now, also, began to grow up within 
his soul that uncompromising protest 
against the vulgar and tasteless commer- 
cialism ruling the present century. He thus 
expresses himself: 

It is a grievous thing to have to say, but say it I 
must, that the one most beautiful city in England, 
the city of Oxford, has been ravaged for many years 
past, not only by ignorant tradesmen, but by the uni- 
versity and college authorities. Those whose special 
business it is to direct the culture of the nation have 
treated the beauty of Oxford as if it were a matter 
of no moment, as if their commercial interests might 
thrust it aside without consideration. 

While still an undergraduate at Oxford he 
"first saw the city of Rouen, then still in its 
outward aspect a piece of the Middle Ages : 
no words can tell you how its mingled 
beauty, history, and romance took hold on 



56 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

me." And he further adds : "I can only say 
that, looking back on my past life, I find it 
was the greatest pleasure I have ever had ; 
and now it is a pleasure which no one can 
ever have again ; it is lost to the world for- 
ever;" that is, because of the injurious and 
ignorant restoration. Morris had come to 
Oxford with a warm admiration for the 
writings of Mrs. Browning. While in col- 
lege he became acquainted, not only with 
the works of Browning and Tennyson, but 
also with certain older writers, with the 
Chronicles of Froissart, and with a book 
destined to exercise a far-reaching influence 
upon him and his circle, the Mortc d' Arthur 
of Sir Thomas Malory. About the time of 
Christmas, 1855, Burne-Jones relinquished 
his intention of entering the ministry, and 
proceeded to find Rossetti in London with 
the purpose of becoming his pupil. Ere 
long he presented his friend Morris to his 
chosen master, whom he then regarded as 
the greatest man in Europe. Without wait- 
ing to take his degree Burne-Jones began 
at once the systematic study and practice of 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 57 

painting. Morris, on the contrary, pre- 
ferred to complete his university course, 
which he did, taking his degree of B.A. in 
1856. 

The first step in William Morris's artistic 
career was when he articled himself to 
George Edmund Street, then located in the 
university town as an architect to the dio- 
cese of Oxford. As fundamental to all art 
he elected an architect's training. He says 
of this pursuit: 

I have spoken of the popular arts, but they might 
all be summed up in that one word "architecture ;" 
they are all parts of that great whole, and the art of 
house-building begins it all. If we did not know 
how to dye or to weave ; if we had neither gold, nor 
silver, nor silk, and no pigments to paint with, but 
half a dozen ochers and umbers, we might yet frame 
a worthy art that would lead to everything, if we had 
but timber, stone, and lime, and a few cunning 
tools to make these common things not only shelter 
us from wind and weather, but also express the 
thoughts and aspirations that stir in us. Architec- 
ture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with 
earlier men ; but if we despise it and take no note of 
how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard 
time of it indeed. 

Morris was possessed of a remarkable fac- 



5 8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

ulty of concentration, being able to wreak 
his whole soul without distraction upon the 
subject in hand, so that he mastered easily 
and quickly the things learned by others 
with difficulty or not at all. In 1856 Mr. 
Morris settled in lodgings with his friend 
Burne- Jones, at 17 Red Lion Square, where 
they shared a studio in common. In this 
same year appeared The Oxford and Cam- 
bridge Magazine, which continued exactly 
twelve months. Among such contributors 
as Vernon Lushington, Jex-Blake, Burne- 
Jones, and D. G. Rossetti, Morris was not 
the least figure, being, indeed, the largest 
contributor, and causing his friends to 
prophesy for him a brilliant future in the 
world of letters. Rossetti introduced Mor- 
ris to Ruskin and other noted artists and 
literary men. Early in 1857 Rossetti thus 
writes to Bell Scott : 

Two young men, projectors of The Oxford and 
Cambridge Magazine, have recently come to town 
from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of 
mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They 
have turned artists, instead of taking up any other 
career to which the university generally leads, and 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 59 

both are men of real genius. Jones's designs are 
marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequaled 
by anything unless, perhaps, Albert Durer's finest 
works ; and Morris, though without practice as yet, 
has no less power, I fancy. He has written some 
really wonderful poetry, too. 

In 1858 Morris published his first volume 
of poems, The Defense of Guinevere. It 
was a remarkable work for a young man 
twenty-four years of age. At that time Ten- 
nyson's Idylls of the King had not yet ap- 
peared ; nor had the published poems of 
Rossetti been other than a few occasional 
pieces contributed to periodicals. Mr. Ar- 
thur Symons writes thus of Morris's De- 
fense of Guinevere: "His first book — which 
invented a new movement, doing easily, 
with a certain appropriate quaintness, what 
Tennyson all his life had been trying to do 
— has all the exquisite trouble of his first 
awakening to the love of romance." 

Burne-Jones delighted to portray upon 
canvas the identical subjects which Morris 
chose for his poems ; these breathe a me- 
diaeval atmosphere, and are full of archaisms 
and quaintnesses which might easily have 



60 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

declined into mannerisms and as easily lent 
themselves to parody. To illustrate : 

Across the empty garden beds, 
When the Sword went out to sea, 

I scarcely saw my sisters' heads 
Eowed each beside a tree. 

I could not see the castle leads, 
When the Szvord went out to sea. 

O, russet brown and scarlet bright, 
When the Szvord zvent out to sea, 

My sisters wore ; I wore but white : 
Red, brown, and white, are three ; 

Three damozels ; each had a knight 
When the Szvord went out to sea. 

A golden gilliflower to-day 
I wore upon my helm away, 
And won the prize of this tourney. 
Hah! hah! la belle jaune giroflee. 

No one goes there now : 

For what is left to fetch away 
From the desolate battlements all arow, 

And the lead roof heavy and gray? 
"Therefore," said fair Yoland of the flowers, 
"This is the tune of Seven Towers." 

There was a lady lived in a hall, 
Large in the eyes, and slim and tall ; 
And ever she sung from noon to noon, 
Tzvo red roses across the moon. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 61 

Yet The Defense of Guinevere was a no- 
table production, and lovers of true poetry 
found in this volume much to impress and 
delight them. Anent the poems contained 
in this first venture Algernon Charles Swin- 
burne says: 

The figures here given have the blood and breath, 
the shape and step, of life ; they can move and suffer ; 
their repentance is as real as their desire ; their 
shame lies as deep as their love. They are at once 
remorseful for their sin and regretful of the pleasure 
that is past. The retrospective vision of Lancelot 
and Guinevere is as passionate and profound as life. 
. . . Such verses are not forgettable. They are not, 
indeed — as the Idylls of the King — the work of a 
dextrous craftsman in full practice. Little beyond 
dexterity, a rare eloquence, and a laborious patience 
of hand has been given to the one or denied to the 
other. These are good gifts and great; but it is 
better to want clothes than limbs. 

Despite this favorable judgment it is said 
that the general reception of his first work 
was so discouraging to the young author 
that he had little heart to continue writing, 
and so turned his hand to other and more 
grateful occupations. Not until repeated 
volumes had attracted public favor did a 



62 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

demand arise for Morris's earliest volume, 
and it then had to be reprinted, the stock 
of "the original impression having been re- 
turned to the paper mill." 

In the autumn of 1857, during a tempo- 
rary residence at Oxford, William Morris 
was introduced to the lady who afterward 
became his wife. She it was whose features 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti delighted to portray 
upon canvas, and whom the artist has im- 
mortalized in numerous drawings and paint- 
ings. The marriage rendered it necessary 
that Morris should provide a suitable home 
for the young bride, and so was begun the 
erection of the "Red House," a structure 
after the bridegroom's own design, and 
which was mainly responsible for the re- 
vival of that style of architecture termed 
"Queen Anne." The firm of "Morris & 
Co., Decorators," is closely connected with 
the development of artistic house furnish- 
ings and decorations during the past twenty 
years and more in England. In the furnish- 
ing of the "Red House," at Bexley Heath, 
Morris had exercised his ingenuity in em- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 63 

broidery design, in ceiling and mural orna- 
mentation, and in numerous other ways had 
become possessed of practical experience in 
various branches of domestic art. It is re- 
corded that neither "love nor money could 
procure beautiful objects of contemporary 
manufacture for any purpose of household 
furnishing or adornment when William 
Morris undertook the herculean and seem- 
ingly hopeless task of decorative reform and 
wrought and brought deliverance from the 
thraldom of the ugly, which oppressed all 
the so-called arts" of this century. That 
branch of the ceramic art which is repre- 
sented by the decoration of tiles owes its 
rescue from vulgarity and degradation to 
William Morris. "All nations, however 
barbarous," said he in his lecture on "The 
Lesser Arts of Life," "have made pottery ; 
but none have ever failed to make it on 
true principles, none have ever made shapes 
ugly or base till quite modern times. . . . 
As to the surface decoration on pottery, it 
is clear it must never be printed." When, 
at the beginning of 1862, tiles were required 



64 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

for the "Red House," there were no hand- 
painted tiles in England, so Morris found 
it necessary to begin at the foundation. 
Plain white tiles were imported from Hol- 
land, and after various experiments with 
glazes and enamels the desired results were 
obtained. 

Of the many industries related to the 
skill of William Morris none has wider 
celebrity than that of wall paper hangings. 
It was he who lifted this branch of domes- 
tic ornamentation above the level of a mere 
crude expedient into a sphere of genuine 
art. His wall paper designs were models 
of beauty and simplicity, and in this par- 
ticular field he was little short of a creator. 
Two or three years after the establishment 
of the firm of "Morris, Marshall, Faulkner 
& Co." Morris conceived the purpose of 
adding weaving to their other enterprises. 
Concerning this art Morris says : 

As the designing of woven stuffs fell into degra- 
dation in the latter days, the designers got fidgeting 
after trivial novelties — change for the sake of 
change ; they must needs strive to make their woven 
flowers look as if they were painted with a brush, 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 65 

or even sometimes as if they were drawn by the en- 
graver's burin. This gave them plenty of trouble 
and exercised their ingenuity in the tormenting of 
their web with spots and stripes and ribs and the rest 
of it, but quite destroyed the seriousness of the work 
and even its raison d'etre. 

It is averred that the attention of Morris 
was drawn to the industry of weaving by 
observing a man in the street selling toy 
models of weaving machines, when it oc- 
curred to him to purchase one and practice 
upon it for himself. After a series of ex- 
periments he endeavored to secure a full- 
size old-style hand loom, with hand shuttle, 
but it was not until well on toward the 
eighties that a Jacquard loom was erected 
in Ormond Yard, when Morris was enabled 
systematically to carry on weaving as a part 
of the work of his firm. 

About 1875 Morris happened to need 
some special shades of silk for embroidery. 
Unable to procure what he desired, he de- 
termined to undertake dyeing on his own 
account. Morris began by dyeing skeins of 
silk for embroidery, and then proceeded to 
dye wool for tapestry and carpets. Morris 



66 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

was strongly of the opinion that certain re- 
sults effected by chemical sicence had proved 
extremely injurious to the art of dyeing. 
He says : 

No change at all befell the art either in the East 
or the North till after the discovery of America ; this 
gave the dyers one new material in itself good, and 
one that was doubtful or bad. The good one was 
the new insect dye, cochineal, which at first was used 
only for dyeing crimson. . . . The bad new material 
was logwood, so fugitive a dye as to be quite worth- 
less as a color by itself (as it was first used) and to 
my mind of very little use otherwise. No other 
new dyestuff of importance was found in America, 
although the discoverers came across such abundance 
of red-dyeing wood growing there that a huge coun- 
try of South America has thence taken its name of 
"Brazil." 

Among the domestic arts taken up by this 
versatile man were printing on textile fab- 
rics, embroidery, dyeing, carpet and arras 
weaving, glass painting, and cabinet mak- 
ing. 

After the volume, Defense of Guinevere, 
the poems of Morris dealt no more with the 
Arthurian legends. This first book was fol- 
lowed by The Life and Death of Jason, one 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 67 

of the longest narrative poems in the lan- 
guage. The plot of the story differs little 
from the classical one, though the setting 
and elaboration are the poet's own. "It was 
all more or less exquisite," says Mr. Saints- 
bury, "it was all more or less novel." Here 
we come upon such rememberable lines as 

Dusk grows the world, and day is weary-faced. 

The slim-leaved, thorny pomegranate 
That flung its unstrung rubies on the grass. 

Darksome night is well-nigh done, 
And earth is waiting silent for the sun. 

And so began short love and long decay, 
Sorrow that bides, and joy that fleets away. 

And one hour 
Ripened the deadly fruit of that fell flower. 

Concerning this book Swinburne says, "In 
all the noble roll of our poets there has been 
since Chaucer no second teller of tales, no 
second rhapsode comparable to the first, till 
the advent of this one." And he adds to 
this word of eulogy : "No higher school has 
brought forth rarer poets than this. . . . 



68 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Here is a poem sown of itself, sprung 
from no alien seed, cut after no alien model, 
fresh as wind, bright as light, full of the 
spring and the sun." 

Ten years intervened between the appear- 
ance of The Defense of Guinevere and the 
first part of The Earthly Paradise. The 
latter work reveals a complete departure 
from his earlier manner and methods. It 
is one of the richest and sweetest produc- 
tions in any language. It is a recital of old 
legends and traditions from many sources, 
but all so molded and interfused with the 
poet's own genius and personality as to ren- 
der them in all essential respects quite origi- 
nal. The prevailing tone of the work is one 
of gentle sadness at the omnipresence and 
inevitability of death, but there is nowhere 
anything weak or maundering. The amaz- 
ing fecundity of the poet is well illustrated 
by presenting the bare titles of the tales con- 
tained in The Earthly Paradise. They are 
as follows: "Atalanta's Race," "The Man 
Born to be King/' "The Doom of King 
Acrisius," "The Proud King," "The Story 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 69 

of Cupid and Psyche," "The Writing on 
the Image," "The Love of Alcestis," "The 
Lady of the Land," "The Son of Crcesus," 
"The Watching of the Falcon," "Pygmalion 
and the Image," "Ogier the Dane," "The 
Death of Paris," "The Land East of the 
Sun and West of the Moon," "The Story of 
Accontius and Cydippe," "The Man Who 
Never Laughed Again," "The Story of 
Rhodope," "The Lovers of Gudrun," "The 
Golden Apples," "The Fostering of As- 
laug," "Bellerophon at Argos," "The Ring 
Given to Venus," "Bellerophon in Lycia," 
"The Hill of Venus." It is almost impos- 
sible to adequately represent the work of 
Morris by any selections from these tales, 
so interwoven with the context are his most 
beautiful lines. However, here is a song 
under the title month "July:" 

Fair was the morn to-day, the blossom's scent 
Floated across the fresh grass, and the bees 
With low vexed song from rose to lily went, 
A gentle wind was in the heavy trees, 
And thine eyes shone with joyous memories; 
Fair was the early morn, and fair wert thou. 
And I was happy — Ah, be happy now ! 



70 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Peace and content without us, love within, 
That hour there was, now thunder and wild rain 
Have wrapped the cowering world, and foolish sin 
And nameless pride have made us wise in vain ; 
Ah, love ! although the morn shall come again, 
And on new rosebuds the new sun shall smile, 
Can we regain what we have lost meanwhile ? 

E'en now the west grows clear of storm and threat, 

But midst the lightning did the fair sun die — 

Ah ! he shall rise again for ages yet, 

He cannot waste his life — but thou and I — 

Who knows if next morn this felicity 

My lips may feel, or if thou still shalt live 

This seal of love renewed once more to give? 

The poet's skill in portraying scenes of 
nature is well indicated by these lines from 
"Pygmalion and the Image:" 

Fair was the day, the honeyed beanfield's scent 
The west wind bore unto him ; o'er the way 
The glittering noisy poplar leaves did play. 

All things were moving ; as his hurried feet 

Passed by, within the flowery swath he heard 

The sweeping of the scythe, the swallow fleet 

Rose over him, the sitting partridge stirred 

On the field's edge ; the brown bee by him whirred, 

Or murmured in the clover flowers below, 

But he with bowed-down head failed not to go. 

Mr. John Morley has written thus of the 
poetical art of William Morris: 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 71 

Mr. Morris's central quality is a vigorous and 
healthy objectivity; people who talk conventional 
cant talk about word-painting should turn to a page 
of Jason or The Earthly Paradise and watch how the 
most delicious pictures are produced by the simplest 
and directest means. Mr. Morris's descriptions, con- 
densed, simple, absolutely free from all that is 
strained and all that is artificial, enter the reader's 
mind with the direct and vivid force of impressions 
coming straight from the painter's canvas. There is 
no English poet of this time, nor perhaps of any 
other, who has possessed this excellent gift of look- 
ing freshly and simply on eternal nature in all her 
many colors, and of reproducing what he sees with 
such effective precision and truthfulness. 

The following lines from "Love is Enough" 
emphasize at least a part of what Mr. Mor- 
ley has so finely said : 

And what do ye say then? that spring long departed 
Has brought forth no child to the softness and show- 
ers; 
That we slept and we dreamed through the summer 

of flowers ; 
We dreamed of the winter, and waking dead-hearted 
Found winter upon vis and waste of dull hours. 

In the year 1871 William Morris and D. 
G. Rossetti entered into the joint occupa- 
tion of Kelmscott Manor, a name which for 
five and twenty years thereafter was asso- 



?2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

dated with some of Morris's most remark- 
able work. Prior to this time Morris had 
become an enthusiastic student of Icelandic 
literature, his studies in this field resulting 
in the translation of The Saga of Gunnlaug 
the Worm-tongue and Rafn the Skald, a 
volume entitled The Story of Grettir the 
Strong, and the Volsung Saga. Of this 
latter work Buxton Forman says: "Here 
the reader will find sentiment enough and 
romance enough — flashes of a weird mag- 
nificence that all the hills of the Land of Ice 
have not been able to overreach with their 
long dusk shadows, and that all the 'cold 
gray sea' that rings the Island of Thule has 
not washed free of its color and heat." 
"The Story of Frithiof the Bold," 'The 
Story of Viglund the Fair," "The Tale of 
Hogni and Hedinn," "The Tale of Roi the 
Fool," "The Tale of Thorstein Staffsmit- 
ten," "The Story of Howard the Halt," 
"The Story of the Banded Men," "The 
Story of Hen Thorir," "The Story of the 
Ere Dwellers," and "The Story of the 
Heath Slayings" followed. That many of 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 73 

these works were in collaboration with Mr. 
Eirikr Magnusson does not detract from the 
immense industry and fertility of Morris'. 
His translations, The Aeneid of Virgil and 
The Odyssey of Homer, must also be re- 
garded as triumphs of literary workmanship. 
In 1877 Morris published his colossal 
work, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, 
and the Fall of the Niblungs. This extend- 
ed poem is written in anapestic rhyming 
couplets. The following quotation will con- 
vey but a slight impression of this noble 
and splendid poem : 

All hail, O Day and thy Sons, and thy kin of the 

colored things ! 
Hail, following Night and thy Daughter that leadeth 

thy wavering wings ! 
Look down with unangry eyes on us to-day alive, 
And give us the hearts victorious, and the gain for 

which we strive ! 
All hail, ye lords of God-home, and Queens of the 

House of Gold ! 
Hail, thou dear earth that bearest, and thou Wealth 

of field and fold ! 
Give us, your noble children, the glory of wisdom 

and speech, 
And the hearts and the hands of healing, and the 

mouths and the hands that teach ! 



74 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

In 189 1 appeared Poems by the Way, a 
collection of the poet's fugitive verse. Dur- 
ing the last eight years of his life, that is, 
from 1888 to 1896, Morris produced little 
poetry. But during this interval he was 
intensely alive to the world of humankind 
and to the great questions which are every- 
where clamoring for solution. He seemed 
to feel that there could be nothing in com- 
mon between modern social conditions and 
the spirit of poesy. 

Morris's revolt against so much that is 
unlovely and grossly utilitarian in our pres- 
ent "unexampled progress" is revealed in 
the following lines from The Earthly Para- 
dise : 

Forget six counties overhung with smoke, 
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, 
Forget the spreading of the hideous town ; 
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, 
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean, 
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green. 

The root of Morris's socialism is to be 
found in the "terrible contrast presented by 
the life of the workmen of the past and the 
life of the workmen of to-day ;" hence "the 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 75 

more profound grew his sense of dissatis- 
faction with the present conditions of so- 
ciety." His yearning for the better time 
was thus expressed: 

Ah ! good and ill, 
When will your strife the fated measure fill ? 
When will the tangled veil be drawn away 
To show us all that unimagined day? 

The poet was constantly moved by his 
overmastering devotion to art and his clear 
perception that, if labor and art are again 
to go hand in hand, man must love his la- 
bor; he saw, further, that in the midst of 
modern social conditions man will not and 
cannot love his work. The distinct propo- 
sition which Morris formulated was this: 
"It is right and necessary that all men 
should have work to do which shall be 
worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to 
do, and which should be done under such 
conditions as would make it neither over- 
wearisome nor overanxious." He says 
again : 

What I mean by socialism is a condition of society 
in which there should be neither rich nor poor, 



76 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

neither master nor master's man, neither idle nor 
overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers nor 
heart-sick hand workers — in a word, in which all 
men would be living in equality of condition, and 
would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with 
the full consciousness that harm to one would mean 
harm to all — the realization at last of the meaning of 
the word "Commonwealth." 

In further explanation of his position he 
said that he was compelled 

Once to hope that the ugly disgraces of civilization 
might be got rid of by the conscious will of intelli- 
gent persons ; yet, as I strove to stir up people to 
this reform, I found that the vulgarities of civiliza- 
tion lay deeper than I had thought, and little by lit- 
tle I was driven to the conclusion that all these 
uglinesses are but the outward expression of the in- 
nate moral baseness into which we are forced by our 
present form of society, and that it is futile to at- 
tempt to deal with them from the outside. 

The unhappy condition of the modern 
workingman, as compared with the work- 
ingman of the past, was a theme to which 
Morris returned again and again. He says : 

Now, they work consciously for a livelihood and 
blindly for a mere abstraction of a world-market 
which they do not know of, but with no thought of 
the work passing through their hands. Then, they 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 77 

worked to produce wares and to earn their liveli- 
hood by means of them ; and their only market they 
had close at hand, and they knew it well. Now, the 
result of their work passes through the hands of half 
a dozen middlemen. Then, they worked directly for 
their neighbors, understanding their wants, and with 
no one coming between them. Huckstering which 
was then illegal, has now become the main business 
of life, and of course those who practice it most suc- 
cessfully are better rewarded than anyone else in the 
community. Now, people work under the direction 
of an absolute master whose power is restrained by 
a trade's union, in absolute hostility to that master. 
Then, they worked under the direction of their own 
collective wills by means of trade guilds. Now, the 
factory hand, the townsman is a different animal 
from the countryman. Then, every man was inter- 
ested in agriculture, and lived with the green fields 
coming close to his own doors. In short, the differ- 
ence between the two may be told very much in these 
words : "In those days daily life as a whole was 
pleasant, although its accidents might be rough and 
tragic. Now, daily life is dreary, stupid, wooden, 
and the only pleasure is in excitement, even if that 
pleasure should be more or less painful or terrible." 

In his Utopian romance, 'News from No- 
where, Morris presents us with a condition 
of human society in which there are no laws 
nor lawyers, no judges, no government. 
He aims at escaping wholly from the com- 



78 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

plex relations of modern life, and seeks to 
enter into a state of primal, untrammeled 
simplicity. According to Mr. Lionel John- 
son, he shows a "loving and personal regard 
for the very earth itself, . . . that sense of 
the motherhood of the earth which makes a 
man love the smell of the fields after rain, 
or the look of running water." The leading 
thoughts which the author seeks to impress 
upon the reader are that "pleasure in work 
is the secret of art and content," and that 
"delight in physical life upon the earth is 
the natural state of man." 

The year 1888 saw the beginning of that 
cycle of prose romances upon which Morris 
continued to work until the end of his life. 
A Tale of the House of the W citings ap- 
peared in December, 1888. In 1890 was 
published The Roots of the Mountains. In 
this year, also, The Story of the Glittering 
Plain was printed as a serial in Macmillan's 
English Illustrated Magazine. Then fol- 
lowed News from Nowhere, which in turn 
was followed by The Wood Beyond the 
World. In 1895 appeared the volume en- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 79 

titled Of Child Christopher and Goldilind 
the Fair, which was succeeded, in 1896, by 
The Well at the World's End, the last work 
which Mr. Morris published before his 
death. The Water of the Wondrous Isles 
and The Sundering Flood are posthumous 
works, in character not unlike their prede- 
cessors. 

Morris took up the work of printing and 
book decoration in the same spirit in which 
he engaged in other arts. All the volumes 
which have come from the Kelmscott press 
are models of beauty and design, and show 
a return to the earlier styles of printing 
and binding when thought and individu- 
ality went into the making of each book. 
Superadded to this is an originality of de- 
tail and execution which set the Kelmscott 
publications quite apart from the usual mod- 
ern products of the press. 

In the month of February, 1896, Morris's 
health gave way, and his friends began to 
entertain for him serious alarm. Afterward 
he seemed to rally a little. But on the third 
of October, 1896, the end came, and he tran- 



8o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

quilly passed away at Kelmscott House, 
Hammersmith. The funeral was unosten- 
tatious, as he would have desired. At Lech- 
lade station the remains were placed on a 
harvest cart, instead of a hearse. The body 
of this cart was painted yellow, the wheels 
red, and the framework had been festooned 
with vines, willow branches, flowers, and 
berries. "The roan mare in the shafts had 
vine leaves in its blinkers, and strings of 
vines were festooned across the top of the 
wain. The bottom of the cart was lined 
with moss." Thus the body of William 
Morris was conveyed to the churchyard of 
his beloved Kelmscott. The grave lies shad- 
owed by tall trees and buried in long grass, 
close to the wall of the little churchyard 
where it is skirted by the country road — a 
remote and quiet resting place for one who, 
throughout his busy and strenuous days, 
dreamed of that happy bourne "where be- 
yond these voices there is peace.' , 

Says a certain writer of the benefits which 
resulted for the age from his artistic 
service : 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 81 

His whole life was a vivid and in many respects a 
successful protest against the squalor of modern in- 
dustrialism. To him, more than to any other man, 
we owe our emancipation from the hideous vulgarity 
of middle- Victorian house decoration and upholstery. 
Others preached, but William Morris, in whom a 
keen artistic sense was happily allied to skilled 
workmanship, was able to supplement precept by 
practice and visibly demonstrate the superiority of 
his methods. ... He warred with brilliant success 
against the tyranny of ugliness . . . surely no 
mean achievement in a mechanical and utilitarian 
age. 



Ill 

JOHN KEATS 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 85 



III 

JOHN KEATS 

No other name, perhaps, in the entire 
range of English literature is so significant 
of precocious genius, vivid and beautiful 
imagination, and unexampled word-paint- 
ing. That a man dying in the twenty-sixth 
year of his age, after a comparatively brief 
season of literary activity, should leave be- 
hind him such an artistic and satisfying 
body of verse, is sufficiently remarkable ; 
but when the fact is also noted that this 
young writer was the founder of a new 
school in the art of poetry — a school which 
to-day is most popular and flourishing — the 
circumstance becomes historical in its value. 
Despite his limited career, so rapid was the 
maturity of his intellectual energies that the 
works which John Keats has left to the 
world will continue to be read, wherever 
the English language is spoken, with re- 
newed astonishment and delight. 



86 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Not infrequently, in these passing days, 
sundry defenses of poetry are written for 
the encouragement of the faithful. It is 
ominous that poetry should at any time be 
regarded as needing defense ; for if it bears 
not within itself its own justification, if it 
no longer makes an appeal to the heart of 
man, then should the discredited bard hang 
his harp upon the willows and possess his 
soul in silence. But who will venture to 
affirm that poetry has lost its power to stir 
the human heart, when such a poet as Keats 
owns an ever-widening circle of apprecia- 
tive readers among the finest spirits of the 
world ? 

To read the poems of Keats is not unlike 
indulging in a draught of rare old vintage ; 
he makes his reader drunk with music; he 
fairly intoxicates with the richness of his 
song. It is impossible steadfastly to peruse 
such poetry ; it cloys with too much melody. 
His finest verses are exquisitely sweet and 
tender, and possess a native birdlike quality 
that goes straight to the heart. Keats lived 
in a world of the past. He moved amid a 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 87 

troop of fantastic shadows half human, half 
divine, god and goddess, faun and satyr, 
nymph and hamadryad, until to him the un- 
real became the real, and "the thing that 
was not as the thing that was." He was 
bewildered in the mazes of his own imagin- 
ings; there he ranged like an uncurbed 
steed ; yet nothing passed from under his 
hand that did not bear the magic impress 
which sealed it "a joy forever." It was a 
favorite idea of Goethe that what once has 
gladdened us can never afterward be wholly 
lost out of our life ; so the spirit of beauty, 
unconsciously imbibed by Keats, grew with 
his growth until it found expression in other 
beauty, and "blossomed in delight." 

His history is a melancholy one, and as a 
victim of literary assassination through po- 
litical and personal malice it is small won- 
der that he was spoken of in his own day 
as "poor Keats." That the poet was un- 
favorably affected by the virulent attacks 
which were made upon his verse has been 
denied, as impeaching the robustness of his 
character. Yet it can scarcely be doubted 



88 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

that such was the mental and physical con- 
dition of the poet that the germs of disease, 
already latent in his constitution, were rap- 
idly developed into activity by the suffering 
and disappointment he must have experi- 
enced through the injustice done to his 
work, as well as through his unhappy love. 
Shelley believed that this was so, and he cer- 
tainly could not have been ignorant of the 
facts in the case. Taking place in litera- 
ture beside those earlier and incomparable 
masters of song, Chaucer and Spenser, 
Keats in some respects seems as remote 
from the present time as they ; yet it is little 
more than an old man's lifetime since, an 
awkward, bashful youth, he sought the en- 
trance to Hazlitt's lecture room or made his 
memorable journey to Scotland, Devon- 
shire, and the Isle of Wight. 

Of humble parentage, John Keats first 
saw the light of the natural day in London, 
October 29, or 31 (it is not determined 
which), 1795, at the house of his grand- 
father, who kept a large livery stable on 
the Pavement in Moor fields. The boy's 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 89 

health was always fragile, for he had been 
a seven-months' child, and his birth is said 
to have been prematurely hastened by his 
mother's intense love of pleasure, though 
in his earlier years his constitution present- 
ed but little indication of the peculiar de- 
bility attendant upon such cases. He was 
one of five children, Edward dying in in- 
fancy, and during his boyhood, which was 
spent at a good, second-class school, seems 
to have been notable chiefly for his warm 
attachment to fistic encounters. He pos- 
sessed, however, an extreme facility in get- 
ting through the daily tasks of school, which 
seemed to make no great demand upon his 
attention, yet in which he never lagged 
behind the others. His easy skill in all 
manly exercises, and the complete ingenu- 
ousness of his disposition, rendered him very 
popular. 

After remaining some time at school his 
intellectual ambition seemed suddenly to de- 
velop. He had been a leader in athletic 
sports; he now determined to capture the 
first prize in literature, and in this he was 



9 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

successful. The son of his tutor, a Mr. 
Clarke, of Enfield, discovered and encour- 
aged the poetical faculty in the young poet, 
whom he introduced to Leigh Hunt. Hunt 
was ever after the warm friend of Keats, 
whom the elder poet undoubtedly brought 
to the notice of the public. Indeed, Hunt 
was to Keats what Schiller was to Korner. 
Our poet left school "with little Latin and 
less Greek." The twelve books of the 
"iEneid" probably constituted the limits of 
his Latin excursions. His acquaintance 
with the Greek mythology, which he after- 
ward employed to such splendid purpose, 
was derived mainly from Lempriere's Dic- 
tionary, a volume which has not yet been 
superseded by some modern works of a 
more pretentious kind. The parents of 
Keats both died while he was young. His 
portion of the property left by them amount- 
ed to nearly two thousand pounds. It would 
seem that this should have sufficed to pre- 
serve the poet from financial difficulties for 
some time ; yet we learn of his having been 
obliged to secure pecuniary aid almost im- 



iLOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 91 

mediately after attaining his majority. But 
it ought to be noted here that Keats was 
of a generous nature, and his purse was 
ever open to his friends, some of whom did 
not scruple to avail themselves of his free- 
handedness. 

Just after leaving school, without his 
wishes having been consulted in the matter, 
he was apprenticed by his guardian to a 
surgeon at Edmonton, where Mr. Cowden 
Clark became his neighbor and friend. Mr. 
Clark introduced him to the poet, Hon. 
William Robert Spencer, whose writings 
at once exerted a most powerful and last- 
ing effect on the plastic mind of the younger 
man. Chaucer was his next passion, and 
for a brief period he seems to have taken 
not a little pleasure in the stormy and lurid 
lines of Lord Byron. But Edmund Spen- 
ser opened to Keats a new poetic world, and 
he went racing through "The Faerie 
Queene" like a colt newly turned to pasture. 
Indeed, an early — if not quite the earliest 
— attempt of Keats at verse-making was an 
imitation of Spenser in the peculiar stanzaic 



92 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

form which was the invention of the latter 
poet, and to which his name has been given. 
In 1817 Keats, having just then come of 
age, published his first volume of poems, 
which exhibited unmistakable signs of 
promise and, to the unprejudiced reader, 
some actual performance. His most valu- 
able acquisition in consequence of this ven- 
ture was the acquaintance and friendship 
of Shelley, Haydon, Godwin, Basil Mon- 
tagu, Hazlitt, and a few others of literary 
reputation and eminence. His political 
views were manly and independent, and 
Leigh Hunt was known to be his friend. 
These were sins which never could be for- 
given by the Quarterly Review. In that 
partisan publication literary judgment and 
preferment were invariably meted out ac- 
cording to political congeniality of senti- 
ments. Its writers were both servile and 
scurrilous, and with them a new author like 
Keats was but a foil for their bigotry and 
literary charlatanism. He was comparative- 
ly friendless and unknown, and even had 
he appealed to the public he could hardly 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 93 

have attracted notice, since he was yet but 
an obscure maker of verses not at all in the 
prevailing vogue. Hence, Gifford, the edi- 
tor of the Quarterly, vented his spleen upon 
his inoffensive victim, conscious of immuni- 
ty amid it all, since the object of his attack 
could no more than turn upon him as the 
worm turns beneath the foot that crushes 
it. A scion of the nobility, infected with 
cacoethes scribendi, might have scribbled 
the veriest nonsense and been certain of 
flattery and applause; but a singular 
genius, brilliant as singular, springing up 
of its own vitality in an out-of-the-way 
corner, was by all means to be extinguished. 
Gifford had formerly been a cobbler, and 
the son of the livery stable keeper was not 
worthy his critical sufferance. Thus it is 
ever with those narrow-minded persons 
who, by the power or caprice of accident, 
rise from a vulgar obscurity into the public 
view; they never can tolerate a brother in 
good fortune, much less superior force or 
talents in that brother. 

On the publication of Keats's next work, 
7 



94 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

"Endymion," Gifford attacked it with all 
the bitterness of which his pen was capable, 
and did not hesitate, before he saw the 
poem, to announce to the publisher his fell 
intention. Keats had endeavored, as much 
as was consistent with honesty and inde- 
pendence, to conciliate the critics at large, 
as may be observed in the brief preface to 
"Endymion." It seems almost incredible, 
at the present stage of literary progress, 
that such a swashbuckling style of criti- 
cism as that indulged in by Blackzvood's 
and the Quarterly Review should have 
passed current with any respectable portion 
of an enlightened public ; and to their credit 
be it said that here and there generous 
voices were raised, the kindly utterances of 
which must have been as balm to the hurts 
of the young poet's soul. He merited to be 
treated with lenity, not wounded with the 
envenomed shafts of political animosity for 
errors of literary taste which time was cer- 
tain to correct. Of intense sentitiveness, 
and his frame already touched by a mortal 
distemper, he felt that his hopes were 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 95 

blighted and his attempts to obtain honora- 
ble public notice frustrated. Some years 
ago an article appeared in the North British 
Review in which the writer sought to prove 
that the critiques in the Quarterly had ex- 
erted no influence whatever in inducing the 
fatal disease by which Keats 's earthly ca- 
reer was so early terminated. In more re- 
cent articles from various pens, celebrating 
the centennial of the birth of Keats, the 
same views have been advanced. But 
Chambers, alluding to the "Endymion," 
says: 

The poem was criticised in a strain of contemp- 
tuous severity by the Quarterly Review; and such 
was the sensitiveness of the young poet panting for 
distinction, and flattered by a few private friends, 
that the critique embittered his existence and in- 
duced a fatal disease. 

And this is the testimony of Shelley in the 
days long before the present log-rolling set 
of London would have rendered such wit- 
ness unnecessary, if not impossible: 

The first effects are described to me to have re- 
sembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching 
that he was restrained from effecting purposes of 



9 6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

suicide. The agony of his sufferings at length pro- 
duced the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs, and 
the usual process of consumption appears to have 
begun. 

Shelley's fearful arraignment of GifTord 
in the prefatory note to "Adonais" lends 
additional emphasis to the foregoing words. 
Lord Byron, alluding to Keats in the 
eleventh canto of "Don Juan," says : 

Poor fellow ! his was an untoward fate : 
"lis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, 
Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article. 

Keats's book abounded with passages of 
rarest beauty and truest poetry, and it is 
difficult to decide whether the cowardice or 
the cruelty of the attack most deserves ex- 
ecration. The following lines, taken from 
the poem almost at random, represent En- 
dymion as wandering in semi-madness 
through the underworld, and there coming 
unexpectedly upon the sleeping Adonis: 

After a thousand mazes overgone, 
At last, with sudden step, he came upon 
A chamber, myrtle-walled, embower'd high, 
Full of light, incense, tender minstrelsy, 
And more of beautiful and strange beside: 
For on a silken couch of rosy pride, 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 97 

In midst of all, there lay a sleeping youth 

Of fondest beauty ; fonder, in fair sooth, 

Than sighs could fathom, or contentment reach ; 

And coverlids gold-tinted like the peach, 

Or ripe October's faded marigolds, 

Fell sleek about him in a thousand folds — 

Not hiding up an Apollonian curve 

Of neck and shoulder, nor the tenting swerve 

Of knee from knee, nor ankles pointing light ; 

But rather giving them to the fill'd sight 

Officiously. Sideway his face reposed 

On one white arm, and tenderly unclosed, 

By tenderest pressure, a faint damask mouth 

To slumbering pout ; just as the morning south 

Disparts a dew-lipp'd rose. . . . Hard by 

Stood serene cupids watching silently. 

One, kneeling to a lyre, touched the strings, 

Muffling to death the pathos with his wings, 

And, ever and anon, uprose to look 

At the youth's slumber ; while another took 

A willow bough, distilling odorous dew, 

And shook it on his hair ; another flew 

In through the woven roof, and fluttering-wise 

Rain'd violets upon his sleeping eyes. 

The following stanzas from "The Eve of 
St. Agnes" are distinctly in advance of the 
previous quotation, both in manner and 
power of expression. Keats progressed in 
his art to the very period of his "taking 
off." 



98 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Out went the taper as she hurried in ; 
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine died : 
She closed the door, she panted all akin 
To spirits of the air, and visions wide : 
No uttered syllable, or, woe betide ! 
But to her heart, her heart was voluble, 
Paining with eloquence her balmy side ; 
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell 
Her throat in vain, and die, heart stifled, in her 
dell. 

A casement high and triple-arch'd there was, 
All garlanded with carven imageries 
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, 
And diamonded with panes of quaint device, 
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, 
As are the tiger moth's deep-damask'd wings ; 
And in the midst 'mong thousand heraldries, 
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, 
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens 
and kings. 

One of Keats's latest essays in poetry 
was the stately but incomplete "Hyperion." 
For powerful word - painting, gloomy 
grandeur of conception, and the self-poised, 
almost weird, skill with which the entire 
picture is produced stroke by stroke, it 
would be difficult to match the selection 
which follows: 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 99 

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, 

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, 

Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, 

Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone, 

Still as the silence round about his lair; 

Forest on forest hung about his head 

Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, 

Not so much life as on a summer's day 

Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, 

But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. 

A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more 

By reason of his fallen divinity 

Spreading a shade : the naiad, 'mid her reeds, 

Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips. 

Along the margin-sand large footmarks went, 

No further than to where his feet had stray'd, 

And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground 

His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, 

Unsceptered ; and his realmless eyes were closed ; 

While his bow'd head seemed list'ning to the earth, 

His ancient mother, for some comfort yet. 

Lord Byron, who justly regarded the 
death of Keats as a loss to English litera- 
ture, said of the poem from which the fore- 
going lines are taken: "His fragment of 
'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the 
Titans, and is as sublime as iEschylus." 
Amid the world's sweetest songs will ever 
be cherished the subtly beautiful "Ode to 

[Lore. 



ioo LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

the Nightingale." The intense sympathy 
with the great deep which seemed to pos- 
sess the young poet has probably been ex- 
perienced in equal degree by but one other 
"builder of lofty rhyme" — namely, Swin- 
burne. This sonnet stands in evidence of 
the manner in which Keats could write of 
the sea: 

It keeps eternal whisperings around 

Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell 
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell 

Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. 

Often 'tis in such gentle temper found 
That scarcely will the very smallest shell 
Be moved for days from where it sometime fell 

When last the winds of heaven were unbound. 

O, ye who have your eyeballs vexed and tired, 
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea ; 

O, ye whose ears are dimmed with uproar rude, 
Or fed too much with cloying melody, 

Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth and brood 
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired. 

Perhaps no other poet, save Goethe, has 
ever obtained such immediate entrance into 
the lovely and precious arcana of nature. 
To the eye of Keats nature unveiled her 
most secret charm. Let it not for a mo- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 101 

merit be believed that his extraordinary gift 
was but the result of an abnormal and mor- 
bid habit of sensation. Genius, whatever 
the forms it may assume, not seldom reaches 
its rarest perfection where common life is 
most dreary and inane. Read the riddle, 
ye who can. It has been said that Keats's 
friendships were always founded on a slight 
and unsubstantial basis, that his own nature 
was so preeminently selfish and his every 
aspiration so self-involved, that every 
friendship was rendered precarious which 
he ever formed. Schiller, in a letter to 
Korner, said, "O how beautiful and divine 
is the union of two souls which meet on 
their way to the Godhead !" The whole 
story of Keats's life determines that he felt 
no less the potency of a genuine friendship ; 
otherwise it were passing strange that he 
should have been able to knit to himself 
with bands stronger than steel such a man 
as Severn, who, through all that prolonged 
tragedy of the poet's final sufferings, proved 
the ultimate possibilities of human devo- 
tion. In a letter to a friend Keats says : 



102 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

We cannot expect to give away many hours to 
pleasure; circumstances are like clouds, continually 
gathering and bursting while we are laughing. The 
seed of trouble is put into the wide arable land of 
events; while we are laughing at sprouts it grows, 
and suddenly bears a poisonous fruit, which we must 
pluck. Even so we have leisure to reason on the 
misfortunes of our friends ; our own touch us too 
nearly for words. 

Here appear those rigid habits of intro- 
spection practiced by every great mind, but 
not that self-centering of the impulses of 
love so destructive of every gracious emo- 
tion. The poet well knew the value of a 
human soul: 

That man is more than half of nature's treasure, 

Of that fair beauty which no eye can see, 

Of that sweet music which no ear can measure. 

About two years before the death of 
Keats the one great event of his life began 
— his love affair. A new phase is now dis- 
covered in the character of the poet, flatly 
contradicting those who have denied that 
he was capable of intense passion, thereby 
depriving all future works he might have 
produced, had he lived, of the force and 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 103 

substance which the works he has left us 
do not possess. In his letters, edited by 
Milnes, and published many years ago, we 
obtain a few distinct and vivid glimpses of 
the object of his desires. He writes to his 
sister : 

She is not a Cleopatra, but at least a Charmian ; 
she has a rich Eastern look, she has fine eyes and 
manners. When she comes into the room she makes 
the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess ; 
she is too fine and conscious of herself to repulse any 
man that may address her ; from habit she thinks 
that nothing particular: I always find myself more 
at ease with such a woman. 

She is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way, for 
there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we 
judge of things — the worldly, theatrical, pantomim- 
ical, and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In 
the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and the Char- 
mian hold the first place in our minds ; in the latter, 
John Howard, Bishop Hooker, rocking his child's 
cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering 
feelings. As a man of the world I love the rich talk 
of a Charmian ; as an eternal being I love the 
thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I 
should like you to save me. 

This concluding sentence, though sound- 
ing very much like nonsense, is nevertheless 
not unimportant. It is obvious that when 



104 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Keats wrote it the first alternative would 
have seemed preferable to the second. In- 
deed, his subsequent story shows beyond 
question that the "worldly, theatrical, pan- 
tomimicar' decidedly outweighed, in the 
poet's practical estimation, the "unearthly, 
spiritual, and ethereal." This "Charmian," 
whatever the fair qualities of mind and 
heart of which she may have been possessed, 
soon brought into captivity the profoundest 
impulses of her lover's nature, simply by 
the peculiar character of her personal at- 
tractions. Nor does it appear that Fanny 
Brawne scorned the advances of the ardent 
poet, though she seems to have been far 
from experiencing toward him an equal 
fervor of devotion. She was not inconsola- 
ble at his loss, and after his pitiful death 
duly settled down to the duties of a com- 
monplace English housewife. It is almost 
a sarcasm of destiny that she has been pre- 
served from oblivion alone by her associa- 
tion with the hectic, passionate, and queru- 
lous young man whose memory she evidently 
held in slight regard. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 105 

It may not be uninteresting to here set 
in juxtaposition marriage views so entirely 
dissimilar as those of Schiller and Keats. 
In a letter to a friend Schiller said : 

I must marry — that is settled. All my induce- 
ments to life and activity are worn out ; this is the 
only one which I have not tried. I must have a 
being near me which belongs to me, which I can and 
must make happy. You know how desolate is my 
spirit, how melancholy my ideas. If I cannot weave 
hope into my existence — hope which has almost de- 
serted me — if I cannot wind up anew the run-down 
machinery of my thoughts and feelings, it will soon 
be all over with me. 

Keats, whose sentiments at one time were 
the direct antitheses of Schiller's, wrote to 
a newly married brother in America: • 

Notwithstanding your happiness and your recom- 
mendations, I hope I shall never marry. Though 
the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at 
the end of a journey or walk, though the carpet were 
made of silk and the curtain of the morning clouds, 
the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet's down, the 
food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window 
opening on Windemere, I should not feel, or rather 
my happiness should not be so fine ; and my solitude 
is sublime. Then, instead of what I have described, 
there is a sublimity to welcome me home ; the roar- 
ing of the wind is my wife, the stars through my 



106 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

window-panes are my children. The mighty abstract 
idea of beauty in all things I have stifles the more 
divided and minute domestic happiness. An ami- 
able wife and sweet children I contemplate as parts 
of that beauty, but I must have a thousand of those 
beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more 
and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, 
that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thou- 
sand worlds. . . . Those things, combined with the 
opinion I have formed of the quality of women, who 
appear to me as children, to whom I would rather 
give a sugarplum than my time, form a barrier 
against matrimony which I rejoice in. 

That Keats completely revised his judg- 
ments in the particulars of which this letter 
treats, the quotations previously presented 
abundantly prove. The following lines, ad- 
dressed to Mr. J. K. Reynolds before the 
time the "Charmian" fever overtook him, 
and when his health was already failing, 
also denote that Keats's views of the subject 
had undergone a change: 

One of the first pleasures I look to is your happy 
marriage, the more so since I have felt the pleasure 
of loving a sister-in-law. I did not think it possible 
to become so much attached in so short a time ; 
things like these, and they are real, have made me 
resolve to have a care of my health. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 107 

Of the religious sentiments of the poet 
not much needs to be written. In one of his 
letters he thus meditates : 

Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be 
hated, the energies displayed in it are fine ; the com- 
monest man shows a grace in his quarrel. By a 
superior being our reasonings may take the same 
tone ; though erroneous, they may be fine. 

On one occasion he falls into the vulgar 
impiety of juxtaposing our Saviour and 
Socrates. That the mind of Keats was in 
a transitional state is evident. Through all 
his spiritual mutations appear an earnest- 
ness of purpose and an unbaffled groping 
after a high and fleeting ideal, lovely 
glimpses of which have been flashed upon 
his inner vision. In another letter he says : 

I have, of late, been molting — not for fresh 
feathers and wings ; they are gone, and in their stead 
I hope to have a pair of sublunary legs. I have al- 
tered — not from a chrysalis into a butterfly, but the 
contrary. ... A year ago I could not understand 
in the slightest degree Raphael's cartoons ; now I 
begin to read them a little. . . . Some think I have 
lost that poetic fire and ardor I once had ; the fact 
is, I perhaps have, but instead of that I hope I shall 
substitute a more thoughtful and quiet power. 



108 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Though the poetry of Keats is mainly 
objective in its character, and as such ex- 
hibits the most minute and careful observa- 
tion, he did not lack those prolonged and 
profound inward searchings which prove 
to the serious and inquiring mind of how 
much greater interest is the esoteric than 
the exoteric world. The sonnet here pre- 
sented reveals the undaunted and undefeat- 
ed self-examinations of a courageous spirit : 

Why did I laugh to-night? no voice will tell, 

No God, no demon of severe response 
Deigns to reply from heaven or from hell ; 

Then to my human heart I turn at once — 
Heart ! thou and I are here, sad and alone ; 

I say, wherefore did I laugh ? — O mortal pain ! 
O ! darkness ! darkness ! ever must I moan 

To question heaven and hell and heart in vain — 
Why did I laugh ? I know this being's lease 

My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads, 
Yet could I on this very midnight cease, 

And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds ; 
Verse, fame, and beauty are intense indeed, 
But death intenser, death is life's high meed. 

The following extract from still another 
letter will illustrate the passionate, almost 
rapturous, pleasure he experienced in the 
composition of his works. He says : 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 109 

This morning poetry has conquered. I have re- 
lapsed into those abstractions which are my only 
life. I feel escaped from a new and threatening sor- 
row ; and am thankful for it. There is an awful 
warmth about my heart like a load of immortality. 

Of the poetical character he observes : 

It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an 
Imogene. What shocks the virtuous philosopher 
delights the chameleon poet. ... A poet is the most 
unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has 
no identity ; he is continually in for and rilling some 
other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men 
and women, who are creatures of an impulse, are 
poetical, and have about them an unchangeable at- 
tribute ; the poet has none ; no identity ; he is cer- 
tainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. 

That Keats was not a finished writer 
must, perhaps, be conceded; but that, like 
Korner, the poet-hero of Germany, he gave 
rich promise of a glorious fruitage will be 
granted. And they must indeed be poor 
judges of literature who are not delighted 
with what he has left. 

A few words as to the temperament and 
personal appearance of the poet. His tem- 
per, until just before his death, always was 
of the gentlest description. It has already 
8 



no LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

been remarked that he was a person of 
strong and irritable sensibilities, and so 
extreme was his sensitiveness that he would 
betray emotion even to tears on hearing of 
a noble action, or at the expression of a 
glowing thought or one of pathetic tender- 
ness ; yet both his moral and physical cour- 
age were above suspicion. The physiog- 
nomy of the poet was indicative of his char- 
acter. Sensibility was predominant, but 
there was no lack of power in the somewhat 
pugnacious nose and mouth. His features 
were clearly defined, and delicately suscep- 
tible of every impression. His eyes were 
large and shadowy, his cheeks hollow and 
sunken, and his face pallid in repose. His 
hair was brown in color, and curled natural- 
ly. His head was small, and set upon 
broad, high shoulders, his body was long 
and abnormally large in proportion to his 
lower limbs, which, however, were not un- 
shapely. His stature was low; and "his 
hands," says Leigh Hunt, "were faded, hav- 
ing prominent veins, which he would look 
upon and pronounce to belong to one who 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS in 

had seen fifty years." "There is death in 
that hand," said Coleridge, after having 
clasped the hand of Keats. 

For several years before his demise the 
poet had felt disease creeping upon him, and 
knew that death was already busy in a sys- 
tem too imperfectly organized. He had im- 
prudently neglected his own health to at- 
tend a dying brother, when he should have 
remembered it was also necessary to take 
care of himself. He was combating the 
keenness of his sorrow consequent upon his 
bereavement by the decease of his brother, 
when the Zoilus of the Quarterly attacked 
him, adding new pain to his already over- 
wrought spirit, so that he told a friend one 
day, with tears, that "his heart was break- 
ing." He was at length induced to try the 
climate of Italy. Thither he went to die. 
He was accompanied in his weakness by 
Severn, his valuable and attached friend 
and an artist of considerable talent. They 
first went to Naples, thence journeying to 
Rome, where Keats closed his eyes on this 
world February 24, 182 1, being a little more 



ii2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

than twenty-five years of age. He eagerly 
wished for death, and shortly before he died 
he said he "felt the daisies growing over 
him." "He suffered so much in his linger- 
ing," says Leigh Hunt, "that he used to 
watch the countenance of his physician for 
the favorable and fatal sentence, and ex- 
press regret when he found it delayed." 
His remains were deposited in the cemetery 
of the Protestants at Rome, at the foot of 
the pyramid of Caius Cestius, near the Porta 
San Paolo. "It might make one in love 
with death," wrote Shelley, "to think that 
one should be buried in so sweet a place." 
A white marble tombstone, bearing a lyre, 
in basso relievo, and the following inscrip- 
tion — the closing words of which were his 
own — has been erected to his memory : 

This grave contains all that was mortal of a Young 
English Poet, who on his deathbed, in the bitterness 
of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, 
desired these words to be engraved on his tombstone : 
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water." 
Feb. 24th, 1 82 1. 



IV 
GEORGE ELIOT 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 115 



IV 

GEORGE ELIOT 

Few, if any, luminaries in the bright 
galaxy of modern English novelists outshine 
that peculiar and vivid orb the splendor of 
which still burns steadily across "the dark 
background and abysm of time," though 
the glory of Trollope, Lytton, Kingsley, 
Reade, Scott, and even Dickens and Thack- 
eray seems to wane through the passing dec- 
ades which have quenched so many lesser 
lights. On the night of December 22, 1880, 
George Eliot conquered "the fever called 
living," and entered into her rest, only a 
few months after the literary Grundies were 
convulsed with astonishment at the an- 
nouncement of the marriage of this eminent 
woman with Mr. J. W. Cross, a London 
banker, formerly resident in New York. It 
has been stated that Mary Ann (or Marian) 
Evans was the daughter of a poor clergy- 
man who at one time was attached to the 



Ii6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Church of England, but eventually became 
a Presbyterian minister. It has been de- 
clared, also, that she was adopted in early 
life by another clergyman of considerable 
wealth, who afforded her opportunities for 
securing a first-class education. These state- 
ments are entirely inaccurate. The facts 
of her early life are little known, and she 
herself was characterized by the reticence 
of genius concerning her own biographical 
data. 

Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury 
Farm, in Warwickshire, England, Novem- 
ber 22, 1819. She remained in the parental 
home, first at Griff, on the same estate, and 
afterward at Coventry, until 1849. ^ er 
father, Robert Evans, was a land agent and 
surveyor, and served for many years as 
agent for the estates of more than one old 
Warwickshire family. In the Midlands he 
is still held in kind remembrance as a man 
of sterling probity and uprightness of con- 
duct. Undoubtedly this father was the 
prototype of more than one admirable char- 
acter in the stories of his gifted daughter. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 117 

George Eliot's early years were passed in 
the regions haunted by the memories of 
Shakespeare. Though it is not clear just 
how or where her education was obtained, 
she seems to have received very careful and 
adequate mental training. Leaving home, 
she came to London while yet a young 
woman, and devoted herself to serious liter- 
ature. She became associated with John 
Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, George Henry 
Lewes, John Chapman, and other writers 
in the Westminster Review, and in time 
came to sustain an editorial connection with 
that publication. In her twenty-sixth year 
she published a translation of Strauss 's fa- 
mous Life of Jesus, her first important 
work. Eight years later appeared her trans- 
lation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christian- 
ity. The dialectic nature of the products of 
her pen introduced her to the philosophic 
society of that period, of which she soon 
became a leading member. It is a question 
whether the abstruse studies in which she 
engaged were of any great advantage to 
her in her equipment as a novelist, though 



n8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

doubtless in mental poise and accuracy in 
the use of language she was steadied and 
guided by the discipline which she received 
in her philosophic researches. 

Such a genius as Miss Evans possessed 
could not long remain in the thralls of pure 
didacticism, and at the suggestion of Her- 
bert Spencer she entered the field of the 
novelist. The nom de plume "George Eliot" 
she employed for the first time when her 
initial work of fiction was sent to Black- 
wood's Magazine. The manuscript of this 
book, Scenes of Clerical Life, was dis- 
patched anonymously to the editor of Black- 
wood's, who at once accepted it, believing 
that he discovered in it the first fruits of an 
unusual and superior ability. George Henry 
Lewes acted as Miss Evans's agent and ad- 
viser in this transaction, and about the same 
time began that intimate association and 
literary companionship which was to termi- 
nate only with the death of Lewes, in 1878. 
Even at this day it is difficult to believe that 
the circumstances and events of a peculiar 
professional life, depicted with such rare 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 119 

skill, pathos, and fidelity, were not at some 
time included in the writer's personal ex- 
perience. This earliest book of stories re- 
vealed in George Eliot the possession of 
that loftiest attribute of genius, the power 
of self-effacement and the projection of the 
author's mind with intensest sympathy into 
her own imaginative creations, until they 
become as real and vital as their antitypes 
of flesh and blood. This gift is sometimes 
called the dramatic instinct, and is disclosed 
in its perfection by Shakespeare, and in a 
scarcely less degree, though in an almost 
wholly subjective relation, by Browning, 
and, notwithstanding the eccentric manner 
of its presentation, in another realm by 
George Meredith. Of the work of an au- 
thor endowed with the dramatic instinct in 
its highest form the delighted reader might 
say, as Emerson remarked of Montaigne's 
essays, "Cut these words, and they would 
bleed/' It is hardly possible to illustrate 
our meaning by any passage w r renched from 
its connection, unless it be one which, with 
its context, is familiar to the reader and in 



120 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

his thought receives emphasis from its set- 
ting in the completed story. However, we 
will venture the following excerpt from 
Middlemarch. It is a portion of that chap- 
ter descriptive of the scene between Will 
Ladislaw and Rosamond Lydgate after they 
have been surprised by Dorothea Casaubon 
in a confidential interview : 

It would have been safe for Will, in the first in- 
stance, to have taken up his hat and gone away ; but 
he had felt no impulse to do this ; on the contrary, 
he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter 
Rosamond with his anger. It seemed as impossible 
to bear the fatality she had drawn down on him 
without venting his fury as it would be to a panther 
to bear the javelin wound without springing and 
biting. And yet — how could he tell a woman that he 
was ready to curse her? He was fuming under a 
repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge. 
He was dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice 
now brought the decisive vibration. In flutelike 
tones of sarcasm she said : 

"You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and ex- 
plain your preference." 

"Go after her !" he burst out, with a sharp edge in 
his voice. "Do you think she would turn to look at 
me, or value any word I ever uttered to her again as 
more than a dirty feather? Explain! How can a 
man explain at the expense of a woman ?" 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 121 

"You can tell her what you please," said Rosa- 
mond, with more tremor. 

"Do you suppose she would like me better for sac- 
rificing you? She is not a woman to be flattered 
because I made myself despicable — to believe that I 
must be true to her because I was a dastard to you." 

He began to move about with the restlessness of a 
wild animal that sees prey but cannot reach it. Pres- 
ently he burst out again : 

"I had no hope before — not much — of anything 
better to come. But I had one certainty — that she 
believed in me. Whatever people had said or done 
about me, she believed in me. That's gone ! She'll 
never again think me anything but a paltry pretense 
— too nice to take heaven except upon flattering con- 
ditions, and yet selling myself for any devil's change 
by the sly. She'll think of me as an incarnate insult 
to her, from the first moment we — " 

Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping 
something that must not be thrown and shattered. 
He found another vent for his rage by snatching up 
Rosamond's words again, as if they were reptiles to 
be throttled and flung off. 

"Explain ! Tell a man to explain how he dropped 
into hell ! Explain my preference ! I never had a 
preference for her, any more than I have a preference 
for breathing. No other woman exists by the side 
of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were 
dead than I would touch any other woman's living." 

Not a little has been said regarding 
George Eliot's tendency to moralize, again 



122 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

and again interrupting the course of her 
narrative to deliver a homily more or less 
obvious even to the casual reader. This 
may or may not be true ; in the opinion of 
at least one of her readers George Eliot's 
preachments are of a kind that we could 
illy spare in a world which is not too easily 
impressed with the value of moral excel- 
lence and the things "pure," "lovely," and 
"of good report." To return to Scenes of 
Clerical Life, who that traverses "Mr. 
GilfiTs Love Story" would be content to 
omit from it such reflections, mingled with 
glimpses of natural phenomena, as follows? 

The inexorable ticking of the clock is like the 
throb of pain to sensations made keen by a sickening 
fear. And so it is with the great clockwork of na- 
ture. Daisies and buttercups give way to the brown 
waving grasses, tinged with the warm red sorrel ; the 
waving grasses are swept away, and the meadows lie 
like emeralds set in the bushy hedgerows ; the 
tawny-tipped corn begins to bow with the weight of 
the full ear ; the reapers are bending amongst it, and 
it soon stands in sheaves ; then, presently, the patches 
of yellow stubble lie side by side with streaks of 
dark-red earth, which the plow is turning up in 
preparation for the new-threshed seed. And this 
passage from beauty to beauty, which to the happy is 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 123 

like the flow of a melody, measures for many a hu- 
man heart the approach of foreseen anguish — seems 
hurrying on the moment when the shadow of dread 
will be followed up by the reality of despair. . . . 

While this poor little heart was being bruised with 
a weight too heavy for it nature was holding on her 
calm, inexorable way, in unmoved and terrible 
beauty. The stars were rushing in their eternal 
courses ; the tides swelled to the level of the last ex- 
pectant weed ; the sun was making brilliant day to 
busy nations on the other side of the swift earth. 
The stream of human thought and deed was hurry- 
ing and broadening onward. The astronomer was 
at his telescope ; the great ships were laboring over 
the waves ; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the 
fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in brief 
rest ; and sleepless statesmen were dreading the pos- 
sible crisis of the morrow. What were our little 
Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent, rushing 
from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than 
the smallest center of quivering life in the water 
drop, hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish 
in the breast of the tiniest bird that has fluttered 
down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has 
found the nest torn and empty. 

The three stones, "The Sad Fortunes of 
the Reverend Amos Barton," "Mr. GilfiFs 
Love Story," and "Janet's Repentance," 
which constitute Scenes of Clerical Life, 
scarcely betray the hand of the novice. So 



124 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

well managed and easy is the dialogue, so 
smooth are the transitions of the narrative, 
so finely balanced and adjusted are all the 
elements of the characters portrayed, that 
Miss Evans seems to have appeared com- 
pletely equipped in the literary arena, as 
Minerva is said to have emerged full-armed 
from the brow of Jupiter. Though, at this 
day, it would seem that anyone possessed of 
literary perception must have discovered in 
these tales of provincial life evidences of 
the remarkable imaginative fertility and in- 
tellectual richness of the author's mind, it 
was not until the publication of her next 
story, Adam Bede, in 1857, that her reputa- 
tion was assured as a fresh and cogent per- 
sonality in the field of letters. Upon the 
appearance of this new book George Eliot 
sprang at a single bound into the very van 
of modern British novelists. Adam Bede 
has been criticised on at least two grounds : 
first, it is alleged that the story presents a 
false and distorted portrayal of "the people 
called Methodists ;" and, second, that in cer- 
tain portions of the book subjects tabooed 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 125 

in polite circles are treated with indelicacy. 
As to the first objection, anyone familiar 
with the history of early Methodism in Eng- 
land will exonerate the author of Adam 
Bede from the charge of inaccuracy or a 
willful perversion of facts. It cannot be 
denied that, amid the varying phases, the 
stirring scenes, and the intense agitation of 
rude but earnest human nature, early Meth- 
odism produced strange and diverse devel- 
opments both of piety and conduct. The 
second charge would scarcely be insisted on 
in these days by any person at all familiar 
with the products of some recent writers of 
fiction — though the signs of a healthful re- 
action against the pruriency of much recent 
so-called literature, and the demand for 
Stevenson's, Weyman's, Doyle's, Hope's, 
and Crockett's romances of derring-do and 
chivalrous adventure, indicate a return to 
good old Sir Walter's knightly tales, and 
the generous and sweetly human pages of 
Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, Reade, 
Trollope, and Kingsley. 

With what strength and delicacy George 
9 



126 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Eliot can treat these subjects which are 
generally tabooed the ensuing passage from 
Adam Bede attests : 

It was about ten o'clock when Hetty set off, and 
the slight hoarfrost that had whitened the hedges in 
the early morning had disappeared as the sun 
mounted the cloudless sky. Bright February days 
have a stronger charm of hope about them than any 
other days in the year. One likes to pause in the 
mild rays of the sun and look over the gate at the 
patient plow horses turning at the end of the furrow, 
and think that the beautiful year is all before one. 
The birds seem to feel just the same; their notes 
are as clear as the clear air. There are no leaves on 
the trees and hedgerows, but how green all the 
grassy fields are ! and the dark purplish brown of 
the plowed earth and the bare branches is beautiful, 
too. What a glad world this looks as one drives or 
rides along the valleys and over the hills ! I have 
often thought so when, in foreign countries, where 
the fields and woods have looked to me like our Eng- 
lish Loamshire — the rich land tilled with just as 
much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes 
to the green meadows — I have come on something 
by the roadside which has reminded me that I am 
not in Loamshire : an image of a great agony — the 
agony of the cross. It has stood, perhaps, by the 
clustering apple blossoms, or in the broad sunshine 
by the cornfield, or at a turning by the wood where a 
clear brook was gurgling below ; and surely, if there 
came a traveler to this world who knew nothing of 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 127 

the story of man's life upon it, this image of agony 
would seem to him strangely out of place in the 
midst of this joyous nature. He would not know 
that, hidden behind the apple blossoms, or among the 
golden corn, or under the shrouding boughs of the 
wood, there might be a human heart beating heavily 
with anguish — perhaps a young blooming girl, not 
knowing where to turn for refuge from swift-ad- 
vancing shame ; understanding no more of this life 
of ours than a foolish lost lamb wandering farther 
and farther in the nightfall on the lonely heath, yet 
tasting the bitterest of life's bitterness. 

Such things are sometimes hidden among the sunny 
fields and behind the blossoming orchards ; and the 
sound of the gurgling brook, if you came close to 
one spot behind a small bush, would be mingled for 
your ear with a despairing human sob. No wonder 
man's religion has much sorrow in it ; no wonder he 
needs a suffering God. 

Hetty, in her red cloak and warm bonnet, with her 
basket in her hand, is turning toward a gate by the 
side of the Treddleston road, but not that she may 
have a more lingering enjoyment of the sunshine and 
think hope of the long unfolding year. She hardly 
knows that the sun is shining ; and for weeks now, 
when she has hoped at all, it has been for something 
at which she herself trembles and shudders. She 
only wants to be out of the high road, that she may 
walk slowly, and not care how her face looks 
as she dwells on wretched thoughts ; and through 
this gate she can get into a field path behind the 
wide, thick hedgerows. Her great dark eyes wander 



128 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

blankly over the fields like the eyes of one who is 
desolate, homeless, unloved, not the promised bride 
of a brave, tender man. But there are no tears in 
them ; her tears were all wept away in the weary 
night before she went to sleep. 

After the publication of Adam Bede, in 
rapid succession followed The Mill on the 
Floss, Silas Mamer, Romola, Felix Holt, 
the Radical; Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, 
and Theophrastus Such. In the Mill on the 
Floss is presented, with all the skill of com- 
position, nicest choice of incident, and the 
abounding resources of genius, the love of 
a brother and sister who in their death were 
not divided. But it is a moot point whether 
in Middlemarch or Romola the splendid lit- 
erary ability of George Eliot reached its 
highest level. Perhaps the honors are about 
equally divided between the two volumes. 
In Romola the figure of Savonarola, the Do- 
minican monk — imposing, dark, mysterious 
— stalks amid the lurid and stormy scenes 
which in Florence made tragic the closing 
years of the corrupt century in which he 
lived. It is with a loving hand that the 
writer has painted, stroke by stroke, the 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 129 

portrait of the great preacher and reformer; 
impressing upon her readers, in a manner 
never to be forgotten, the Frate's fiery elo- 
quence, his consuming earnestness, his un- 
compromising boldness, his refinement and 
mysticism. The strong resemblance which 
the countenance of George Eliot bore to 
that of Savonarola has frequently been re- 
marked, and it may have been the uncon- 
scious sympathy thus engendered within 
her that enabled her to produce so vital and 
memorable a portrayal of the Florentine 
prophet. One of the most artistically 
wrought, as well as realistic, incidents of 
modern fiction is that wherein Tito Melema 
escapes death by drowning in the stream 
only to meet it in the long grass on the river 
bank at the hands of his injured and fren- 
zied father. This passage will also serve 
as an adequate example of the method by 
which George Eliot produces, word by word 
and sentence by sentence, the culminating 
and abiding impression: 

Tito knew him, but he did not know whether it 
was life or death that had brought him into the pres- 



i 3 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

ence of his injured father. It might be death — and 
death might mean this chill gloom, with the face of 
the hideous past hanging over him forever. 

But now Baldassarre's only dread was lest the 
young limbs should escape him. He pressed his 
knuckles against the round throat and knelt upon 
the chest with all the force of his aged frame. Let 
death come now. 

Again he kept watch on the face. And when the 
eyes were rigid again he dared not trust them. He 
would never lose his hold till some one came and 
found them. Justice would send some witness, and 
then he, Baldassarre, would declare that he had killed 
this traitor, to whom he had once been a father. 
They would, perhaps, believe him now, and then he 
would be content with struggle of justice on earth — 
then he would desire to die with his hold on this 
body, and follow the traitor to hell that he might 
clutch him there. 

And so he knelt, and so he pressed his knuckles 
against the round throat, without trusting to the 
seeming death, till the light got strong, and he could 
kneel no longer. Then he sat on the body, still 
clutching the neck of the tunic. But the hours went 
on, and no witness came. No eyes descried, afar 
off, the two human bodies among the tall grass by 
the riverside. Florence was busy with greater af- 
fairs and the preparation of a deeper tragedy. 

Not long after these two bodies were lying in the 
grass Savonarola was being tortured, and crying out 
in his agony, "I will confess." 

It was not until the sun was westward that a 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 131 

wagon, drawn by a mild gray ox, came to the edge 
of the grassy margin, and as the man who led it 
was leaning to gather up the round stones that lay 
heaped in readiness to be carried away he detected 
some startling object in the grass. The aged man 
had fallen forward, and his dead clutch was on the 
garment of the other. It was not possible to separate 
them — nay, it was better to put them into the wagon 
and carry them as they were into the great Piazza, 
that notice might be given to the Eight. 

Romola is not George Eliot's most popu- 
lar novel, but, as illustrating her vast con- 
structive skill, the polemical bias of her 
mind, the singular ability with which she 
could turn current traditions and historical 
events to the novelist's account, her wide 
acquaintance with ancient and mediaeval lit- 
erature, and her power of absorbing the 
peculiar aura of an ardent nationality, this 
book will always be considered among her 
best. The virile quality of this great 
woman's writings is indicated by the fact 
that for years the pseudonym under which 
she wrote was accepted as the genuine name 
of a man of extraordinary genius and 
knowledge. We know of but one other 
such instance of equal interest on record, 



i 3 2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

and that is of a notable French woman who 
for many years sent forth her writings to 
the world under the fictitious name of 
George Sand. 

The private life of George Eliot has been 
made the subject of much unfair and igno- 
rant discussion. The paucity of details re- 
garding her domestic affairs renders it not 
altogether safe to pronounce judgment upon 
what may, superficially, perhaps, appear to 
be a violation of the sanctity of the mar- 
riage bond. It has already been stated that 
the manuscript of Scenes of Clerical Life 
was sent to the publishers of Blackwood's 
Magazine by George Henry Lewes. Mr. 
Lewes was a student of philosophy, the au- 
thor of a few philosophical treatises, and 
the writer of a Life of Goethe, by which 
work he is best known. He had a wife who 
had abandoned him two or three times ; aft- 
er having condoned her offenses on former 
occasions, he at last refused to countenance 
longer her vagaries of passion, and so made 
their separation final. He met Mary Ann 
Evans, being attracted to her both by her 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 133 

philosophical writings and admiration for 
her superior intellectual attainments, and, 
though Miss Evans was reticent to an ex- 
treme degree, she was finally persuaded to 
share with him his home. It seems to have 
been a case of purely mental affinity. They 
lived together in London, and henceforth 
to her intimate friends George Eliot be- 
came known as Mrs. Lewes. Lewes be- 
came her literary agent and adviser, jeal- 
ously guarding her every interest, and so 
protecting and fostering her intellectual life 
that she was enabled to develop it under 
the most favorable conditions. This inti- 
mate association and close literary friend- 
ship terminated only with the death of Mr. 
Lewes, in 1878. Mr. Lewes having been 
unable to obtain a divorce from his first, 
erring wife, the union between the philos- 
opher and the authoress could not be ren- 
dered legal by either Church or State, 
though it was sanctioned by the approval 
and good wishes of a large circle of refined 
and intelligent personal friends. Not a few 
persons are disposed to regard with a 



134 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

lenient eye the moral vagaries of the pos- 
sessors of genius. It has been said that 
"the being who is gifted with genius does 
not possess it ; it possesses him, and he and 
we have to pay the penalty." But nature is 
a stern Nemesis, and every false position 
into which we may be betrayed involves its 
own sorrow and loss. In his volume en- 
titled My Confidences Frederick Locker- 
Lampson says: 

I am sure that she [George Eliot] was very sensi- 
tive, and must have had many a painful half hour 
as the helpmate of Mr. Lewes. By accepting the po- 
sition she had placed herself in opposition to the 
moral instincts of most of those whom she held most 
dear. Though intellectually self-contained, I believe 
she was singularly dependent on the emotional side 
of her nature. With her, as with nearly all women, 
she needed a something to lean upon. Though her 
conduct was socially indefensible, it would have been 
cruel, it would be stupid, to judge her exactly as one 
would judge an ordinary offender. What a genius 
she must have had to have been able to draw so many 
high-minded people to her ! I have an impression 
that she felt her position acutely, and was unhappy. 
George Eliot was much to be pitied. 

And elsewhere he says of the relation of 
George Eliot and Mr. Lewes, "He was ever 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 135 

on the alert to shield her from worries and 
annoyance, and keen to get her good terms 
from the publishers, but somehow it seemed 
an incongruous partnership." 

George Eliot was a passionate admirer of 
personal beauty in either man or woman, as 
witness her descriptions of Hetty Sorrel 
and Tito Melema. Probably this was the 
result of intense consciousness of her own 
deficiencies in respect to physical comeli- 
ness. Locker-Lampson again writes: 

Nature had disguised George Eliot's apparently 
stoical yet really vehement and sensitive spirit, and 
her soaring genius, in a homely and insignificant 
form. Her countenance was equine — she was rather 
like a horse, and her head had been intended for a 
much larger body ; she was not a tall woman. She 
wore her hair in not pleasing, out-of-fashion loops, 
coming down on either side of her face, so hiding her 
ears ; her garments concealed her outline — they gave 
her a waist like a milestone. You will see her at her 
very best in the portrait by Sir Frederick Burton. 
To my mind George Eliot was a plain woman. 

Of her habits of conversation the same 
writer observes : 

She had a measured way of conversing, restrained 
but impressive. When I happened to call she was 



136 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

nearly always seated in the chimney corner on a low 
chair, and she bent forward when she spoke. As 
she often discussed abstract subjects, she might have 
been thought pedantic, especially as her language 
was sprinkled with a scientific terminology ; but I 
do not think she was a bit of a pedant. Then, 
though she had a very gentle voice and manner, there 
was every now and then just a suspicion of meek 
satire in her talk. Her sentences unwound them- 
selves very neatly and completely, leaving the im- 
pression of past reflection and present readiness ; 
she spoke exceedingly well, but not with all the sim- 
plicity and verve, the happy abandon of certain prac- 
ticed women of the world ; however, it was in a way 
that was far more interesting. I have been told that 
she was most agreeable en tete-a-tete ; that when sur- 
rounded by admirers she was apt to become orator- 
ical — a different woman. She did not strike me as 
witty or markedly humorous ; she was too much in 
earnest. She spoke as if with a sense of responsi- 
bility, and one cannot be exactly captivating when 
one's doing that. 

Of the poetry of George Eliot not much 
needs to be written, though curiously 
enough she herself preferred it to her nov- 
els. It is pale and colorless, as compared 
with the iridescent splendors of her prose 
compositions. Her natural mode of ex- 
pression was not in verse. While much of 
her prose is essentially poetical, her large 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 137 

powers evidently chafed under the restraints 
and limitations imposed by metrical laws 
and the exigencies of rhyme. While her 
patience as an artist was long and deep, she 
lacked that subtler gift or instinct which 
makes the poet the seer, and whereby his 
utterances are forged from the central fires 
of his life. "The Legend of Jubal," "How 
Lisa Loved the King," and "The Spanish 
Gypsy" are the most notable of her poetical 
writings. The didactic habit of her mind 
quenched the singer's sibylline rage. The 
following stanzas embody her nearest ap- 
proach to lyric fire : 

Sweet evenings come and go, love, 

They came and went of yore ; 
This evening of our life, love, 
Shall go and come no more. 

When we have passed away, love, 
All things will keep their name; 

But yet no life on earth, love, 
With ours will be the same. 

The daisies will be there, love, 
The stars in heaven will shine; 

I shall not feel thy wish, love, 
Nor thou my hands in thine. 



138 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

A better time will come, love, 

And better souls be born ; 
I would not be the best, love, 

To leave thee now forlorn. 

If the fame of George Eliot rested upon 
her poetry alone that fame to-day would be 
a vanishing quantity. It is an interesting 
psychological question, or perhaps a ques- 
tion in mental pathology, why so many 
great writers, unsatisfied with their noble 
conquests in the commoner field of prose, 
like good Captain Wegg, "drop into poetry." 
The examples of Macaulay, Carlyle, Rus- 
kin, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Lamb, 
Thackeray, and, more recently, Mr. Glad- 
stone in his translations from Horace, and 
Meredith and Hardy, occur at once as cases 
in point. Probably others could be recalled 
with a little effort of the memory. But there 
is one brief poem from the pen of George 
Eliot which is a beautiful and dignified com- 
position, worthy the inspired muse of the 
most gifted of the tuneful ilk. These lines 
have been quoted frequently, but they may 
be introduced here as constituting the best 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 139 

specimen of George Eliot's now all-but- 
forgotten verse: 

Oh may I join the choir invisible 

Of those immortal dead who live again 

In minds made better by their presence : live 

In pulses stirred to generosity, 

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 

For miserable aims that end with self, 

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 

And with their mild persistence urge man's search 

To vaster issues. 

So to live is heaven : 
To make undying music in the world, 
Breathing as beauteous order that controls 
With growing sway the growing life of man. 
So we inherit that sweet purity 
For which we struggled, failed, and agonized 
With widening retrospect that bred despair. 
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, 
A vicious parent shaming still its child 
Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved ; 
Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies, 
Die in the large and charitable air. 
And all our rarer, better, truer self, 
That sobbed religiously in yearning song, 
That watched to ease the burden of the world, 
Laboriously tracing what must be, 
And what may yet be better — saw within 
A worthier image for the sanctuary, 
And shaped it forth before the multitude 
Divinely human, raising worship so 



i 4 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

To higher reverence more mixed with love — 
That better self shall live till human Time 
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky 
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb 
Unread forever. 

This is the life to come, 
Which martyred men have made more glorious 
For us who strive to follow. May I reach 
That purest heaven, be to other souls 
The cup of strength in some great agony, 
Enkindle generous ardor, feel pure love, 
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty — 
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, 
And in diffusion ever more intense. 
So shall I join the choir invisible 
Whose music is the gladness of the world. 

The later works of George Eliot were 
extremely successful in a pecuniary way. 
She received but fifteen hundred dollars 
for Scenes of Clerical Life. But Middle- 
march brought her forty thousand dollars, 
and Daniel Deronda nearly as much more. 
Only one other female author has rivaled 
George Eliot as regards financial rewards 
of her work — Mrs. Humphry Ward. 

Upon the death of Mr. Lewes, after a 
year and a half of virtual widowhood, 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 141 

George Eliot was married May 6, 1880, at 
St. George's, Hanover Square, London, to 
Mr. John Walter Cross. Mr. Cross was 
much younger than his bride, and had long 
been a valued and esteemed friend of both 
herself and Mr. Lewes. Says Locker- 
Lampson of the new union : 

George Eliot's more transcendental friends never 
forgave her for marrying. In a morally immoral 
manner they washed their virtuous hands of her. I 
could not help thinking it was the most natural thing 
for the poor woman to do. She was a heavily laden 
but interesting derelict, tossing among the breakers, 
without oars or rudder, and all at once the brave 
Cross arrives, throws her a rope, and gallantly tows 
her into harbor. 

A little more than seven months after 

her marriage with Air. Cross, George Eliot 

passed into that realm where Time himself 

"shall furl his wings and cease to be." The 

funeral of Air. Lewes had been held in the 

mortuary chapel in Highgate Cemetery, 

and there the funeral of George Eliot was 

also held. It was a day of snow and slush, 

and a bitter w r ind was blowing, "but still," 

avers an eyewitness, "there was a remark- 
10 



142 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

able gathering from all parts of England." 
Of her burial place a writer in the London 
Chronicle says: 

When you get to the top of Swain's Lane you see 
two gates ; take the one on the right and, entering, 
keep to the left. The path sweeps round a little hil- 
lock, and in a few steps you see in front of you a great 
block of buildings. This is St. Pancras Infirmary. 
You keep straight on until you come to the last turn- 
ing to the left; take that, and after ten yards you 
come on a plain gray granite obelisk and pedestal, 
together not more than ten feet high. Without your 
attention being called to this quiet memorial, amid so 
many elaborate commemorations of sorrow, you 
would pass it unnoted. But stop a moment and 
read. This is what you see : 

"Of those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence." 



Here lies the Body of 
"George Eliot," 
Mary Ann Cross, 
Born 22 November, 1819 ; 
Died 22 December, 1880. 
That is the simple yet eloquent inscription cut on 
the granite pedestal in severely plain letters of gold. 
The Spartan brevity and simplicity of it is in keep- 
ing with the great writer's life and philosophy. 
And the inevitableness of the "common lot" is un- 
consciously emphasized by the fact that on her right 
is a monument more ornate than her own, chron- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 143 

icling the death of an unknown family. Here, fac- 
ing the east and the rising sun, lie the ashes of one 
who bore a proud name in the brilliant roll of Eng- 
lish literature, resting after a busy life of earnest 
purpose and much great work accomplished. Many 
may regret that a more conspicuous, a more elaborate 
monument does not mark the Friedensheim of the 
author of Middlcmarch, Felix Holt, Adam Bede, and 
Romola. These have to be reminded that George 
Eliot's most "enduring brass' is to be found in her 
works and the memory of her life. 

There are not a few reviewers and self- 
appointed critics who persistently talk of 
some one's writing the great American 
novel, as though it must be a product dif- 
fering in kind and in art from the great 
novels of other lands. It might be inter- 
esting to know just what these persons 
mean by the terms they employ — provided 
the conception is clear in their own minds. 
Where is the distinctively great English, 
French, or Russian novel? Neither Tom 
Jones, nor Les Miserables, nor Peace 
and War fulfill the requirments, for these 
are not and could not be sufficiently inclu- 
sive to portray every phase of the life and 
nationality which the author represented. 



144 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

So if George Eliot has not produced a work 
of fiction which at its points of contact 
touch every side of English civilization, 
within her own field she has displayed a 
potentiality rivalled only by the master 
novelists of the world. 

The attainments of George Eliot were 
remarkably extensive. She was a classical 
scholar, and to her familiarity with the 
principal modern languages she added an 
acquaintance with Russian and modern 
Greek. She was widely learned in the 
physical sciences, the arts and philosophies, 
and was a profound student in the history 
of human thought and investigation. The 
peculiar characteristics of her mind were 
acute analysis, unerring perception of fit- 
ness and relation, a luxuriant but chastened 
fancy, and a rare and delightful energy of 
expression. Her style is a compound of 
classicism and didacticism, of scientific tech- 
nicality and broad colloquialism. Not one 
of her countrywomen of this or any former 
period, excepting Mrs. Browning, can com- 
pare with her in expressive ability, keen- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 145 

ness of discrimination, and forceful and 
elegant English. Among female writers 
what Mrs. Browning is in poetry George 
Eliot is in prose. Though not so much 
given to the use of the incisive and vig- 
orous Saxon words with which our lan- 
guage abounds as Mrs. Browning was, yet 
she fully equaled her in knowledge of the 
delicate shades of difference in nearly 
synonymous terms, while she easily sur- 
passed her in methods of technical utter- 
ance and the fullness of her vocabulary. 
The mantle of the high-priestess of British 
novelists, the peeress of Dickens and Thack- 
eray, and the greatest of that trio of great 
female story writers, Jane Austen, Char- 
lotte Bronte, and George Eliot, lies where 
she dropped it. Who shall be worthy to 
wear it after her? 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 

AND HIS SISTER 

CHRISTINA 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 149 



V 

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AND HIS 
SISTER CHRISTINA 

'To one who believes that there is in a 
name some mysterious power influencing 
the destiny of a human being, the painter- 
poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, affords an ex- 
ample in evidence. Rossetti himself seems 
never to have forgotten the fact that he 
bore the name of Italy's greatest bard. The 
man upon whom devolves the burden of an 
illustrious name, if he be not borne down 
by it into listless despair, may be aroused 
to supreme endeavors to live up to the ex- 
pectations of the friends who in addressing 
him involuntarily recall his glorious proto- 
type. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a remarkable 
member of a remarkable family. Such a 
group of children as Dante Gabriel, Wil- 
liam Michael, and Christina G. Rossetti are 
seldom found in the same household. Even 



150 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

the quiet, claustral spirit of the elder sister, 
Maria, was a shrine whence the clear-point- 
ed flame of genius burned heavenward, 
though it was not for the world's curious 
gaze. Rossetti's father, Gabriele Rossetti, 
was a Neapolitan political refugee resident 
in London, and one of the most highly es- 
teemed of Italy's recent patriotic poets. 
He was a profound and lifelong student of 
Dante, concerning whose works he cher- 
ished theories peculiarly his own. The 
mother of Dante Rossetti was of mixed 
English and Italian parentage, so that in 
the veins of the artist there was more Ital- 
ian than English blood. 

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, known 
to the world as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was 
born May 12, 1828, in London. He was 
the second of four children, Christina, his 
sister, being the youngest. In the charac- 
teristics which distinguished Dante Ros- 
setti, and Christina as well, were included 
some of the rarest qualities of the two na- 
tionalities which in these notable lives came 
to their confluence. Dante and Christina 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 151 

were both scribblers in their childhood, 
writing stories and verses successively, the 
example being set them in their home by 
their tireless father, from whose pen flowed 
poems and other compositions innumerable. 
Dante's schooling was not of the broadest 
kind, though when he left King's College 
in the summer of 1842 he was reasonably 
well acquainted with Sallust, Ovid, and 
Vergil, knew the rudiments of Greek, and 
could read easily in French. 

With Rossetti's peculiarities and skill in 
the art of painting we have little to do here, 
except as he illustrated the Preraphaelite 
theories of art by his brush as well as by 
his verse. Rossetti is better known as a 
writer than as a painter, since, throughout 
his entire life, he was averse to placing his 
canvases on public exhibition. His regular 
preparation for the profession of painting 
was of brief duration. After a period of 
study at Cary's drawing academy he was 
admitted as a student in the Antique School 
of the Royal Academy. He did not com- 
plete his course in this school, finding it 



i 5 2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

irksome to subject himself to methods pre- 
scribed by others, and liking always to do 
things in his own way. As the head of the 
Preraphaelite Brotherhood he displayed a 
power and originality in his art work which 
compelled the attention of connoisseurs to 
the fact that a new intellectual force had 
made its advent among them. Ruskin early 
became one of Rossetti's patrons, so that 
the singular endowments of the young art- 
ist are beyond question. Notwithstanding 
the present tendency to belittle the so-called 
Preraphaelite movement — and Rossetti him- 
self ere his death seemed to think lightly 
of it — the ability of such men as Rossetti, 
Millais, Holman Hunt, Woolner, Col- 
linson, and Stephens exerted an influence 
which is felt at this very day in the world 
of art. 

On the side of letters, also, it is no slight 
proof of poetic puissance to make one's 
voice heard and imitated amid the babel 
of minor singers ever challenging the pub- 
lic ear. Dante Rossetti early and easily 
rose above the mass of bardlings whose par- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 153 

rotlike repetitions of the master's manner 
might, mauger their maddening wearisome- 
ness, be regarded as the sincerest form of 
flattery. When "The Blessed Damozel'' 
appeared, written at the time Rossetti was 
in his nineteenth year, he who ran might 
read that a new luminary, brilliant and 
unique, had risen in our poetical skies. The 
extraordinary symbolism employed by this 
writer, the earthly passion projected into 
spiritual experiences, the human longing 
surviving amid celestial environments, the 
sensuous, almost sensual, beauty breathing 
through the entire poem, set its author 
apart as a real and distinct energy in the 
literature of his generation. This poem 
was avowedly written to be the counter- 
part of Poe's "Raven." As the latter poem 
depicts from the earthly viewpoint the 
yearnings of bereaved affection, so "The 
Blessed Damozel" portrays the same emo- 
tions from the celestial side. Scattered 
through this poem there are successive lines 
and stanzas as unforgetable as anything 
that has ever been written: 



154 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

The blessed damozel leaned out 
From the gold bar of heaven ; 

Her eyes were deeper than the depth 
Of waters stilled at even ; 

She had three lilies in her hand, 

And the stars in her hair were seven. 

Her hair that lay along her back 
Was yellow like ripe corn. 

Beneath, the tides of day and night 
With flame and darkness ridge 

The void, as low as where this earth 
Spins like a fretful midge. 

And the souls mounting up to God 
Went by her like thin flames. 

And still she bowed herself and stooped 
Out of the circling charm ; 

Until her bosom must have made 
The bar she leaned on warm, 

And the lilies lay as if asleep 
Along her bended arm. 

The sun was gone now ; the curled moon 

Was like a little feather 
Fluttering far down the gulf. 

I'll take his hand and go with him 
To the deep wells of light ; 

As unto a stream we will step down, 
And bathe there in God's sight. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 155 

We two will stand beside that shrine, 

Occult, withheld, untrod, 
Whose lamps are stirred continually 

With prayer sent up to God ; 
And see our old prayers, granted, melt 

Each like a little cloud. 

Given a compound of Poe and Shelley 
and Keats and Baudelaire and Vaughan, 
with an added element of a completely novel 
personality interfused through the whole, 
and you have a Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 
his employment of parentheses and refrains 
Rossetti, like William Morris, sometimes 
irritates his readers by what seem to be 
mere affectations and mannerisms. To not 
a few, also, Rossetti's mysticism is far from 
pleasant, though this, be it said, is the weird 
moonlight flower whose roots struck into 
those shadowy deeps where lay united, not 
to be dissevered, the genius and the life of 
the man. Rossetti, with his mysticism elim- 
inated, would have been another and, to 
one reader at least, a less pleasing Rossetti 
than the poet whom we know and have 
learned to love. 

Let it not for a moment be supposed that 



156 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Rossetti's mystical tendencies froze within 
his bosom the kindly stream of human in- 
terest and fellowship. His heart ever beat 
in tune with the pulsations that stirred the 
common heart of the world. He was an 
admirer and defender of Robert Browning 
while as yet that great poet was generally 
unknown or was mentioned only in terms 
of ridicule and jest. He was characterized 
by a quick and generous appreciation of 
ability in others, and always stood ready in 
every possible manner to encourage strug- 
gling talent. Philip Bourke Marston, the 
blind poet, Oliver Madox Brown, our own 
Walt Whitman, and others shared the help- 
ful interest which he manifested in his fel- 
lows of the pen and the palette. Rossetti 
preserved not a little of his boyish relish 
for fun nearly to the close of his life. In 
1874 he writes to his brother William : "At 
present I am going about with a black patch 
over my nose. Last night Jenny Ulle and 
I agreed to shriek at the same moment, one 
'Crupy' and the other 'Crawly,' in Dizzy's 
[the dog's] two ears, while May beat a 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 157 

tattoo on the top of his head. The instant 
result was that he turned round howling 
and bit me — fortunately not Jenny — across 
the nose, at which I am not surprised." A 
warm, full-blooded, abundant humanita- 
rianism flows through many of Rossetti's 
lines, notably the poem entitled "Jenny," 
written before the poet had attained his 
majority, than which no more simple, nat- 
ural, broadly philosophic production in 
verse, and none more fully embodying the 
spirit of the thirteenth chapter of First Cor- 
inthians, has been published within the pres- 
ent century. This poem enters into the dis- 
cussion of a subject which few writers of 
prose or poetry would dare or care to un- 
dertake, namely, a courtesan who receives 
the visit of a man by night and who falls 
asleep upon his knee, thus arousing within 
him through "dead, unhappy hours" of 
watching reflections painful and pitiful to 
the last degree. The delicacy, the strength, 
the certainty of touch, the exquisite loveli- 
ness of this poem are beyond praise. Here, 

too, are memorable couplets, the grace, per- 
il 



158 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

fume, and unexpectedness of which are like 
early violets in the young grass: 

Poor handful of bright spring water 
Flung in the whirlpool's shrieking face. 

But must your roses die, and those 
Their purpled buds that should unclose? 
Even so ; the leaves are curled apart, 
Still red as from the broken heart, 
And here's the naked stem of thorns. 

The cold lamps at the pavement's edge 
Wind on together and apart, 
A fiery serpent for your heart. 

Like a toad within a stone 

Seated while time crumbles on ; 

Which sits there since the earth was cursed 

For man's transgression at the first; 

Which, living through all centuries, 

Not once has seen the sun arise; 

Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, 

The earth's whole summers have not warmed ; 

Which always — whitherso the stone 

Be flung — sits there, deaf, blind, alone ; — 

Aye, and shall not be driven out 

Till that which shuts him round about 

Break at the very Master's stroke, 

And the dust thereof vanish as smoke, 

And the seed of man vanish as dust — 

Even so within the world is lust. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 159 

As a writer of sonnets Dante Rossetti is 
well-nigh unequaled. Some of his sonnets 
written for pictures are nearly unapproach- 
able in excellence, while the sonnet-se- 
quence entitled "The House of Life" sur- 
passes in richness, variety, and abounding 
vitality any other sonnet-sequence whatso- 
ever, not excepting the ''Sonnets from the 
Portuguese." Like a cleft pomegranate, 
this red-veined fruit of a fertile life, opened 
anywhere, shows the crimson heart within 
as the heart of a man. What treasures were 
buried from mortal delight in the poems in- 
terred in the same grave with the poet's 
dead wife, and afterward exhumed, these 
sonnets of "The House of Life" may reveal. 
Here is one, under the caption "Broken 
Music :" 

The mother will not turn, who thinks she hears 
Her nursling's speech first grow articulate ; 
But breathless, with averted eyes elate, 
She sits, with open lips, and open ears, 
That it may call her twice. 'Mid doubts and fears 
Thus oft my soul has hearkened ; till the song, 
A central moan for days, at length found tongue, 
And the sweet music welled and the sweet tears. 



i6o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

But now, whatever while the soul is fain 

To list that wonted murmur, as it were 

The speech-bound seashell's low, importunate 

strains — 
No breath of song, thy voice alone is there, 
O bitterly beloved ! and all her gain 
Is but the pang of unpermitted prayer. 

The manner in which Dante Rossetti 
formed the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth 
Eleanor Sidclal, the lady who afterward 
became his wife, is sufficiently romantic. 
Walter Howell Deverell, a young painter 
much liked, though not a member of the 
Preraphaelite Brotherhood, one day accom- 
panied his mother to a bonnet shop in Cran- 
borne Alley, and among the shop assistants 
saw a young woman handing down a band- 
box. She was very beautiful, tall, finely 
molded, with a lofty neck and a wealth of 
coppery, golden hair. Deverell obtained 
the privilege of sittings from this lovely 
model, whom Rossetti soon after saw, ad- 
mired, loved, and to whom he became en- 
gaged to be married. Miss Siddal herself 
developed artistic talents of no mean order. 
Of her Rossetti said : "Her fecundity of in- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 161 

vention and facility are quite wonderful — 
much greater than mine." The single pub- 
lished specimen of her verses is very far 
from discreditable to her skill in this direc- 
tion. "Guggum," "Guggums," and "Gug" 
seem to have been the whimsical, and not 
very euphonious, pet names which Rossetti 
applied to his fair one. Miss Siddal's health 
was extremely delicate, and she died of an 
overdose of laudanum in less than two years 
after her marriage with Rossetti in i860. 

It appears to be a well-established fact 
that from the year 1872 until the close of 
his life, in 1882, Rossetti was mentally un- 
balanced. The excessive use of chloral and 
whisky was probably contributory to, if it 
did not produce, this deplorable result. In 
the Contemporary Review for October, 
1871, an article was published under the 
caption "The Fleshly School of Poetry — 
Mr. D. G. Rossetti." The article was signed 
by one Thomas Maitland. Not long there- 
after it came to the knowledge of Rossetti 
that Thomas Maitland was none other than 
Mr. Robert Buchanan, the English poet, 



162 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

novelist, and essayist. The critique was 
unduly severe, and to Rossetti probably un- 
just. Mr. Buchanan has since retracted 
the strictures contained in the article, and 
in a manly way has expressed his high ap- 
preciation of Rossetti's work. But such was 
the mental and physical distemper of the 
unhappy artist that, upon the publication 
of Mr. Buchanan's criticism, his mental 
equilibrium was upset, and it was never 
again wholly restored. For years he was 
subject to delusions of the most painful 
character. Old friends were regarded as 
united in a conspiracy against him, and 
even strangers were accused of intentionally 
insulting him. When Mr. Browning's 
"Fifine at the Fair" was published Rossetti 
at once seized upon certain lines toward the 
close of the poem as containing a covert, 
but spiteful, attack upon himself. Mr. 
Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) wrote a nonsen- 
sical poem entitled "The Hunting of the 
Snark." This Rossetti also declared to be 
a pasquinade directed against his fair fame. 
Again, while at Broadlands, a friend's seat 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 163 

in Hampshire, Rossetti one day became 
greatly excited at a thrush singing in a 
neighboring garden, fancying that the bird 
had been trained by the enemies of his 
peace to ''ejaculate something insulting to 
him." On still another occasion he sud- 
denly left Kelmscott, where he had been 
sojourning for a season, having plunged 
into a quarrel with some anglers by the 
river, conceiving them to have uttered 
something derogatory to him. Yet through 
all this dark period he continued to paint 
and write with even more than his former 
skill and industry. 

Rossetti's home for many years was at 
Tudor House, Chelsea. Here dwelt with 
him at one time Swinburne and George 
Meredith, and at a later date Hall Caine. 
Here, also, Rossetti gathered about him 
much old furniture and crockery, inaugu- 
rating the fashion of collecting bric-a-brac 
which so generally prevailed a few years 
ago. One charming trait of Rossetti's 
character appears in the tender and thought- 
ful affection which he ever cherished toward 



164 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

his mother. In his beautifully filial letters 
to her he again and again addresses her as 
"My Dearest Mother," and sometimes by 
the absurdly affectionate titles of "Teaksi- 
cunculum" and ''Darling Teaksicum." He 
closes one epistle to his mother thus : "Take 
care of your dear, funny old self, and be- 
lieve me your most loving son." 

Rossetti's grave is at Birchington-on- 
Sea, where he closed his eyes on this world 
April 9, 1882. The tombstone, which is an 
Irish cross, was designed by Madox Brown. 
The inscription, written by William Michael 
Rossetti, is as follows: 

Here sleeps Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, hon- 
ored, under the name of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
among painters as a painter, and among poets as a 
poet. Born in London, of parentage mainly Italian, 
12 May, 1828. Died at Birchington, 9 April, 1882. 
This cruciform monument, bespoken by Dante Ros- 
setti's mother, was designed by his lifelong friend 
Ford Madox Brown, executed by J. and H. Patte- 
son, and erected by his brother William and sister 
Christina. 

The world, so tardy to recognize, so slow 
to remember, its flame-winged ministers of 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 165 

song, will not consent to forget Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti. His clayey form has 
melted from human sight like a mist-born 
vision of the morning, but the breath of his 
genius still lingers to awaken music in rare 
and sensitive souls, as the wind murmurs 
through an iEolian harp. His memory 
shall not be as his own dissolving image, 
of which he sang in "Love's Nocturn:" 

Like a vapor wan and mute, 

Like a flame, so let it pass ; 
One low sigh across her lute, 

One dull breath against her glass ; 

And to my sad soul, alas ! 
One salute 

Cold as when death's foot shall pass. 

No student of letters will need to be 
warned that popularity is not a test of ex- 
cellence in the literary realm. Whatever 
may be said to the contrary, and however 
impotent we may be to define it in authen- 
tic terms, there is a recognized and perma- 
nent standard of taste and of ethics. To it 
is always made an unconscious appeal, for 
it is the product of genius striving to attain 



166 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

the ultimate ideals. Few or none who write 
for the applause of the current hour are 
likely to achieve this standard. Perhaps 
it is not too much to say that in their own 
day the books which become classics sel- 
dom challenge the attention of the multi- 
tudes. 

In the poetry of Christina G. Rossetti 
may be clearly traced the austere beauty 
of a chaste and nun-like spirit. The poems 
of the brother and of the sister have very 
little in common except an underlying seri- 
ousness of purpose and an almost fastidious 
sense of melody. Christina's verse may be 
said to uniformly express the conflicts, the 
longings, and the aspirations of a deeply 
religious mind. Her treatment of pietistic 
themes is all her own, and it is astonishing 
what a varied music she is able to produce 
upon a single string. It cannot be doubted 
that, upon the whole, the sister's outlook 
upon life was saner than that of the brother, 
whose latter years were so sadly clouded by 
mental infirmity. 

When, a few years ago, the voice of Chris- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 167. 

tina Rossetti sank into the hush of death, 
England lost her sweetest songstress since 
Mrs. Browning sent up her swan-notes be- 
neath Italian skies. Undoubtedly the con- 
tact into which Christina was brought with 
the clever young men who were the asso- 
ciates of her brothers,, as recorded in the 
two goodly volumes containing the memoir 
and family letters of Dante Rossetti, aided 
her not a little in the development of her 
intellectual life. She seemed easily to com- 
mand all the melodious resources of which 
our language is capable. "Goblin Market" 
is a bizarre fantasy wrought out with ut- 
most adroitness, the lesson of which seems 
to be contained in the closing lines : 

For there is no friend like a sister, 
In calm or stormy weather, 
To cheer one on the tedious way, 
To fetch one if one goes astray, 
To lift one if one totters down, 
To strengthen whilst one stands. 

But it is in her lyrics that she is pre- 
eminent. The dewy freshness and simplici- 
ty of such a song as that beginning, 



168 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

My heart is like a singing bird 
Whose nest is in a watered shoot, 

well illustrate the lark-like quality of Miss 
Rossetti's notes. "Another Spring," and 
the song "When I Am Dead, My Dearest," 
are all but flawless in their way. How sweet 
and graceful are her strains the last men- 
tioned lyric well attests: 

When I am dead, my dearest, 

Sing no sad song for me ; 
Plant thou no roses at my head, 

Nor shady cypress tree : 
Be the green grass above me 

With showers and dewdrops wet ; 
And if thou wilt, remember, 

And if thou wilt, forget. 

I shall not see the shadows, 

I shall not feel the rain ; 
I shall not hear the nightingale 

Sing on, as if in pain : 
And, dreaming through the twilight 

That doth not rise nor set, 
Haply I may remember, 

And haply may forget. 

Miss Rossetti's devotional pieces are shot 
through and through with the lovely fancies 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 169 

and exalted symbolisms of the genuine poet. 
Unlike most religious verse, hers is lifted 
far above the dreariness and commonplaces 
of mediocrity. Her own intense individu- 
ality informs every stanza, almost every 
line. Here is a brief poem entitled "Weary 
in Well-doing:" 

I would have gone ; God bade me stay : 
I would have worked ; God bade me rest. 

He broke my will from day to day, 
He read my yearnings unexpressed, 
And said them nay. 

Now I would stay ; God bids me go : 
Now I would rest; God bids me work. 

He breaks my heart tossed to and fro, 
My soul is wrung with doubts that lurk 
And vex it so. 

I go, Lord, where thou sendest me ; 

Day after day I plod and moil : 
But, Christ my God, when will it be 

That I may let alone my toil, 
And rest with thee? 

In the Preface to the recent volume, New 
Poems by Christina Rossetti, her brother, 
William Michael Rossetti, has recorded the 
curious fact that, notwithstanding the inti- 



170 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

macy of their home life and the large 
amount of verse which Christina has left 
to the world, he never saw his sister in the 
act of composition. 

These observations concerning this song- 
ful twain may not be further prolonged. 
They lived and sang through their allotted 
years, and their songs are yet with us. Let 
us be grateful for them. Now that the 
singers are beyond the reach of human 
blame or blessing, hands are not lacking to 
weave chaplets of praise wherewith to 
adorn their tombs. Slow, too slow, is this 
old world to learn the oft-repeated lesson 
that the words of panegyric uttered above 
unconscious dust are as idle and ineffectual 
as the wind that bears them away. If the 
dead could be reached by the joys or sor- 
rows of the living, many a heart misjudged 
and broken, which, despairing, has ceased 
to beat, would, amid its solemn shadows, 
be rilled with gladness and perpetual peace. 
Let us hope that the following sonnet, one 
of Miss Rossetti's best, may not be alto- 
gether wide of a precious possibility: 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 171 

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept 
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may 
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay, 

Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept. 

He leaned above me, thinking that I slept 

And could not hear him ; but I heard him say, 
"Poor child, poor child !" and as he turned away 

Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept. 

He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold 
That hid my face, or take my hand in his, 
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head : 
He did not love me living ; but once dead 
He pitied me ; and very sweet it is 

To know he still is warm, though I am cold. 



VI 

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

12 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 17s 



VI 

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF JAMES 
RUSSELL LOWELL 

It has been said that the days of the art 
of letter writing are forever past; that the 
telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, 
and the modern newspaper have reduced 
the epistles that pass between friends to 
the exchange of the merest conventional 
civilities. In these strenuous and rushing 
years little opportunity is found to enjoy 
the pleasant and gossipy leisureliness of the 
old-time letter writers. The letters of Cow- 
per, of Dean Swift, of Keats, of Landor, of 
Carlyle, and his brilliant wife, of Emerson, 
of the two Brownings, and, we might add, 
of R. L. Stevenson will never be duplicated, 
because temp or a mutantur, et nos mutamur 
in Mis. And yet, down to the very year of 
his death, the letters of Lowell were the 
same delightful, lucid, and witty expres- 
sions of a charming personality. In them 



i/6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

are quaint bits of observation, wise and in- 
cisive comments upon men and things, sud- 
den revelations of a heart overflowing with 
love, passages as bright with humor as any- 
thing that appears in the Moosehcad Jour- 
nal, erudite allusions, and quotations from 
the most diverse sources, until it would 
seem that the advent of one of these letters 
must have been marked as an important 
event in the experience of the recipient. 

James Russell Lowell first opened his 
eyes to the light of the natural sun in Cam- 
bridge, Mass., on February 22, 18 19, a day 
noted in the calendar of American patriot- 
ism as the one made memorable by the 
nativity of the immortal Washington. Low- 
ell was most fortunate in his antecedents. 
His father was a cultured clergyman, a 
lover of books and of the benign and beau- 
tiful things of life. The poet's mother was 
of an ancient Orkney family, and through 
her were filtered into the blood of the son 
the solitude and romantic mystery of those 
northern islands. Lowell's early home was 
such as would foster the poetic instincts of 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 177 

a child. Elmwood, a product of colonial 
times, stood in the midst of lawn and gar- 
den, orchard and English elms. It was a 
roomy old-fashioned house, rising amid its 
rural surroundings, with an air of quiet 
respectability all its own. There were five 
other children in the Lowell household, 
three brothers and two sisters, all older 
than the poet. He was an ardent little fel- 
low, loving boyish pastimes, and was happy 
and healthy in affections and temperament 
as a boy should be. We may obtain a 
glimpse of his joyous childhood from the 
following letter to his brother Robert, writ- 
ten seventy-one years ago: 

My Dear Brother, — I am now going to tell you 
melancholy news. I have got the ague together 
with a gumbile. I presume you know that September 
has got a lame leg, but he grows better every day and 
now is very well but still limps a little. We have a 
new scholar from round hill, his name is Hooper 
and we expect another named Penn who I believe 
also comes from there. The boys are all very well 
except Nemaise, who has got another piece of glass 
in his leg and is waiting for the doctor to take it 
out, and Samuel Storrow is also sick. I am going to 
have a new suit of blue broadcloth clothes to wear 



i;8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

every day and to play in. Mother tells me that I 
may have any sort of buttons I choose. I have not 
done anything to the hut but if you wish I will. I 
am now very happy ; but I should be more so if you 
were there. I hope you will answer my letter if 
you do not I shall write you no more letters, when 
you write my letters you must direct them all to me 
and not write half to mother as generally do. Moth- 
er has given me three volumes of tales of a grand- 
father. 

farewell Yours truly 

James R. Lowell. 

You must excuse me for making so many mistakes. 
You must keep what I have told you about my new 
clothes a secret if you dont I shall not divulge any 
more secrets to you. I have got quite a library. 
The Master has not taken his rattan out since the 
vacation. Your little kitten is as well and as playful 
as ever and I hope you are to for I am sure I love 
you as well as ever. Why is grass like a mouse you 
cant guess that he he he ho ho ho ha ha ha hum hum 
hum. 

Lowell matriculated at Harvard as a 
freshman, when he was fifteen years of age. 
Although somewhat diffident, he made 
friends among his classmates, and found 
much enjoyment in his college days. In 
a letter written to W. H. Shackford, in 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 179 

1836, the critical habit of Lowell's mind 
already begins to appear. He says : 

I am reading the life of Milton, and find it very 
interesting ; his first taste (as well as Cowley's) for 
poetry was formed by reading Spenser. I am glad 
to have such good examples, for Spenser was al- 
ways my favorite poet. I like the meter of the 
"Faerie Queene;" Beattie's "Minstrel" is in the 
same. Apropos of poetry, I myself (you need not 
turn up your nose and grin) — yes, I myself have cul- 
tivated the muses, and have translated one or two 
odes from Horace, your favorite Horace. I like 
Horace much, but prefer Virgil's "Bucolics" to his 
"Odes," most of them. If you have your Horace by 
you, turn to the IXth Satire, 1st Book, and read it, 
and see if you don't like it (in an expurgated edi- 
tion). 

In a letter to G. B. Loring, written in 
the same year as the foregoing, we have an- 
other allusion to the fact that he has begun 
the writing of poetry: 

Here I am, alone in Bob's room with a blazing fire, 
in an atmosphere of "poesy" and soft-coal smoke. 
Hope, Dante, a few of the older English poets, By- 
ron, and last, not least, some of my own composi- 
tions, lie around me. Mark my modesty. I don't 
put myself in the same line with the rest, you see. 



i8o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Writing to W. H. Shackford the follow- 
ing year, he gives apparently the first inti- 
mation of what his pursuit in life shall be : 
"I thought your brother Charles was study- 
ing law. I intend to study that myself, and 
probably shall be Chief Justice of the 
United States." 

That dominant love for the home of his 
birth and childhood, which made Lowell 
cling to Elmwood to the closing day of his 
life, he expresses in another letter to Lor- 
ing, penned April 5, 1837: 

To revisit the home of one's childhood has much 
of joy, but it is a joy mingled with sadness. To 
think how soon those flowers that have bloomed, 
those fields that have smiled, and those trees that 
have so often arrayed themselves in "summer's garb" 
for you, may bloom and smile and array themselves 
for another ! You may think me a fool to talk in 
such a moralizing strain, but, George, I have lately 
talked less and thought more. I mean to read next 
term, if possible, a chapter in my Bible every night. 

The increasingly studious habits of his 
mind and that bonhomie which were charac- 
teristic of Lowell throughout his later life 
are now (1837) well defined. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 181 

I am busy as a bee — almost. I study and read and 
write all the time. I have laid my hands on a very 
pretty edition of Cowper, which I intend to keep. 
In two volumes I have also "pinned" some letters 
relating to myself in my early childhood, by which 
it seems I was a miracle of a boy for sweetness of 
temper. "Credite posterl!" I believe I was, al- 
though perhaps you would not think it now. 

Already, in this same year, he begins to 
find himself able to express his intense love 
of nature: 

You can't imagine how delightful it is out here. 
The greatest multitude of birds of every description 
that I ever recollect to have seen. The grass is fast 
growing green under the kind sun of spring — that is, 
in southerly aspects. Every day that the sun shines 
I take my book and go out to a bank in our garden, 
and lie and read. 'Tis almost as pleasant as 

To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell. 
. . . The birds now sing loudest, and the fowling 
piece breaks "the quiet of the scene" less often than 
at any other time. Besides, 'tis beautiful to watch 
the different steps of nature's toilet, as she arrays 
herself in the flowery dress of Spring. It almost 
seems as if one could see the grass grow green. 
Then, too, the sky is so clear. 

Years after this expression of his love 
for nature, Lowell wrote in the same spirit 
as follows: 



182 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

The older I grow the more I am convinced that 
there are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent 
as our sympathies with outward nature. I have not 
said just what I meant, for we are thrilled even more 
by any spectacle of human heroism. But the others 
seem to bind our lives together by a more visible and 
unbroken chain of purifying and softening emotion. 
In this way the flowering of the buttercups is always 
a great, and I may truly say religious, event in my 
year. . . . There never was such a season, if one only 
did not have to lecture and write articles. There 
never is such a season, and that shows what a poet 
God is. He says the same thing over to us so often, 
and always new. Here I've been reading the same 
poem for nearly half a century, and never had a no- 
tion what the buttercups in the third stanza meant 
before. But I won't tell. 

In one of his early letters, written while 
he is rusticating in Concord for having 
neglected certain studies of the college cur- 
riculum, he thus mentions Thoreau : "I met 
Thoreau last night, and it is exquisitely 
amusing to see how he imitates Emerson's 
tone and manner. With my eyes shut, I 
shouldn't know them apart." 

The decidedly poetical bias of Lowell's 
nature is now clearly apparent. "I have 
been reading the first volume of Carlyle's 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 183 

Miscellanies/' he writes. "One article, that 
on Burns, is worth all the rest to me. I 
like, too, the one on German playwrights. 
There are fine passages in all." About this 
time there was some thought upon the part 
of the poet of entering a divinity school, 
that he might prepare himself for the min- 
istry. He seems to have been possessed of 
very distinct notions with regard to a 
clergyman's condition as related to his 
work, and reached the conclusion that he 
was not adapted to the minister's vocation. 
He says: 

No man ought to be a minister who has not a 
special calling that way. I don't mean an old-fash- 
ioned special calling, with winged angels and fat- 
bottomed cherubs, but an inward one. In fact, I 
think that no man ought to be a minister who has 
not money enough to support him besides his salary. 
For the minister of God should not be thinking of 
his own and children's bread, when dispensing the 
bread of life. I have been led to reflect seriously on 
the subject since I have thought of going into the 
divinity school. Some men were made for peace- 
makers and others for shoemakers, and if each man 
follow his nose we shall come out right at last. If 
I did not think that I should some day make a great 
fool of myself and marry (not that I would call all 



184 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

men fools who marry), I would enter the school to- 
morrow. Certain am I that it is not pleasant to 
work for a living anyway, but "we youth" must live, 
and verily this "money" is a very good thing, though 
on that account we need not fall down and worship 
it. The very cent on which my eye now rests may 
have done a great deal of good in its day ; perhaps it 
has made glad the heart of the widow, and put a 
morsel of bread in the famishing mouths of her chil- 
dren ; and perhaps it has created much misery ; per- 
haps some now determined gambler began his career 
of sin by playing chuck-farthing with that very piece 
of stamped copper. 

In this same letter his burning love of 
liberty, which seemed to intensify with pass- 
ing years, obtains a tentative utterance that 
came to its culmination long afterward in 
the noble "Commemoration Ode:" 

A plan has been running in my head, for some 
time, of writing a sort of dramatic poem on the sub- 
ject of Cromwell. Those old Roundheads have never 
had justice done them. They have only been held up 
as canting, psalm-singing, hypocritical rascals ; as a 
sort of a foil for the open-hearted Cavalier. But it 
were a strange thing indeed if there were not some- 
what in such men as Milton, Sidney, Hampden, 
Selden and Pym. It always struck me that there 
was more true poetry in those old fiery-eyed, buff- 
belted warriors — with their deep, holy enthusiasm 
for liberty and democracy, political and religious; 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 185 

with their glorious trust in the arm of the Lord in 
battle — than in the dashing, ranting Cavaliers, who 
wished to restore their king that they might give vent 
to their passions, and go to sleep again in the laps of 
their mistresses, deaf to the cries of the poor and the 
oppressed. 

After the final relinquishment of his nas- 
cent purpose of entering the ministry Low- 
ell turned his attention to the study of law, 
but only at intervals and in a desultory and 
half-hearted manner. He says : 

I am reading Blackstone with as good a grace and 
as few wry faces as I may. ... A very great change 
has come o'er the spirit of my dream of life, I 
have renounced the law. I am going to settle down 
into a business man at last, after all I have said to 
the contrary. Farewell ! a long farewell, to all my 
greatness ! I find that I cannot bring myself to like 
the law, and I am now looking out for a place "in a 
store." You may imagine that all this has not come 
to pass without a struggle. ... I have been thinking 
seriously of the ministry, but then — I have also 
thought of medicine, but then — still worse ! ... On 
Monday last I went into town to look out for a place, 
and was induced en passant to step into the United 
States Court, where there was a case pending in 
which Webster was one of the counsel retained. I 
had not been there an hour before I determined to 
continue in my profession and study as well as I 
could. 



186 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

The vacillation of Lowell's mind at this 
period with regard to his life pursuit is well 
portrayed by the foregoing quotations. The 
poet's interest in matters of public concern 
had already been kindled, although he was 
still ineligible to vote, not yet having come 
of age. In view of the Biglow Papers and 
their influence upon their time, and also 
of Lowell's brilliant career as the repre- 
sentative of his country at the Spanish court 
and at the Court of St. James, some of the 
lines in a letter written November 15, 1838, 
seem to be almost prophetic: 

I shouldn't wonder if the peaceable young gentle- 
man whom you know in college flared up into a great 
political luminary. I am fast becoming ultra-demo- 
cratic, and when I come to see you, which I trust 
will be very soon, I intend to inoculate you with the 
(I won't call it by the technical term of "virus," be- 
cause that's too hard a word, but with the) principle. 
... By the very last accounts from England, im- 
mense meetings have been held in all parts of Eng- 
land to petition Parliament for an equal representa- 
tion. . . . There is a great and pregnant change, 
ominous of much. It almost brings tears into my 
eyes when I think of this vast multitude starved, 
trampled upon, meeting to petition the government 
which oppressed them, and which they supported by 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 187 

taxes wrung out of the very children's lifeblood. 
Verily, some enthusiasts have even ventured to as- 
sert that there are hearts, aye, even warm ones, under 
frieze jerkins. 

Again Lowell swings toward the law, 
with the pathetic tergiversation character- 
istic of so many young men groping toward 
their lifework. In these days of large prices 
for famous names and commonplace per- 
formances, it is rather wholesome to note 
the highest fees to which Lowell aspired 
in payment for a lecture : 

The more I think of business, the more really un- 
happy do I feel and think more and more of study- 
ing law. In your letter you speak of my lecturing in 
Andover, about which I forgot to speak to you. Do 
they pay expenses? They gave me four dollars in 
Concord. I wish they'd take it into their heads to 
ask me at Cambridge, where they pay fifteen dollars, 
or in Lowell, where they pay twenty-five dollars ! 
What to do with myself I don't know. 

Lowell had been accused of indolence by 
his friends. The accusation seems to have 
had a basis of fact, and the poet himself 
recognized it. Yet it has ever been so with 
those possessed of poetical genius ; it comes 



i88 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

to its best only in that atmosphere of leis- 

ureliness and contentment wherein indeed 

the „ . . ,. 

. . . Spirit lies 

Under the walls of Paradise. 

Here is the young writer's confession: "I 
am lazy enough and dilatory enough, heaven 
knows, but not half so much so as some of 
my friends suppose. At all events, I was 
never made for a merchant, and I even be- 
gin to doubt whether I was made for any- 
thing in particular but to loiter through 
life." 

In view of the eagerness with which pub- 
lishers afterward sought the work of Low- 
ell's pen, the desire expressed to publish a 
volume of his poems is curiously striking: 

If I could get any bookseller to do it for me, I 
would publish a volume of poems. Of late a fancy 
has seized me for so doing. If it met with any com- 
mendation I could get paid for contributions to peri- 
odicals. I tried last night to write a little rhyme — 
but must wait for the moving of the waters. The 
nine goddess virgins who dance with tender feet 
round the violet-hued fountain of Hippocrene, and 
whose immortal voices drop sweetly from their lips, 
will not come to me. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 189 

Apropos of his relation to the law he writes 
again, in 1839 : 

If I live, I don't believe I shall ever (between you 
and me) practice law. I intend, however, to study it 
and prepare myself for practicing. But a blind pre- 
sentiment of becoming independent in some other 
way is always hovering round me. Above all things 
should I love to be able to sit down and do something 
literary for the rest of my natural life. 

The first mention of Miss Maria White, 
afterward Mrs. Lowell, we find in a letter 
addressed by Lowell to G. B. Loring, and 
bearing date December 2, 1839: 

I went up to Watertown on Saturday with W. A. 
White and spent the Sabbath with him. You ought 
to see his father. The most perfect specimen of a 
bluff, honest, hospitable country squire you can pos- 
sibly imagine. His mother, too, is a very pleasant 
woman — a sister of Mrs. Gilman. His sister is a 
very pleasant and pleasing young lady, and knows 
more poetry than anyone I am acquainted with. I 
mean she is able to repeat more. She is more fa- 
miliar, however, with modern poets than with the 
pure wellsprings of English poesy. 

Lowell completed his studies at the Har- 
vard Law School in 1840, receiving the de- 
gree of Bachelor of Laws. His father had 
13 



i 9 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

suffered financial reverses, and the poet 
now found himself confronted with the ne- 
cessity of earning his own livelihood. In 
these straits, as other good men have done 
in all ages, Lowell became engaged to be 
married. Miss Maria White was a woman 
of uncommon personal attractiveness, and 
her mental endowments were of a high or- 
der. She, too, wrote poetry, and thus was 
peculiarly fitted to sympathize with the 
tastes and aspirations of her gifted husband. 
About this time Lowell concluded to col- 
lect his poems for publication, which he did 
under the title of A Year's Life. The little 
book at once gave its author an assured 
place among his younger poetical compeers. 
Lowell published his second volume of verse 
in 1843, and this second venture afforded 
indubitable evidence of maturing power. 
In 1844 Lowell published a volume of prose 
consisting of Conversations on Some of the 
Old Poets. The critical and analytical bent 
of his mind was now well determined, and 
the work in this book already showed ele- 
ments of future power. At the close of 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 191 

this year Lowell married, despite his very 
limited and precarious income. He began 
to write for antislavery organs, and, being 
deeply moved by the noblest humanitarian 
instincts, he gave utterance week after week 
to sentiments that stirred like a bugle blast. 
Thus the Biglow Papers began to appear, 
and were at once received with an expres- 
sion of popular favor which has never 
changed. In 1848 they were issued in a 
volume, and in the same year the Fable for 
Critics and the Vision of Sir Launfal were 
written and published. 

The fugitive ideal — we have sought to 
capture it, but it has still eluded our utter- 
most cunning. We have caught a fleeting 
glimpse of its loveliness — a splendor flashed 
for an instant upon our eyes — and our 
hearts forever after have known a vague 
unrest. Sometimes we have turned our 
weary eyes toward a smiling height, and 
have seen a shadowy hand beckoning us 
thither. Our lives may have been empty of 
some longed-for satisfactions, but we, too, 
have had our starry moments — our preg- 



i 9 2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

nant intimations of at least one glorious 
possibility whose whispers we have heard. 
It was so with our poet. The growing 
temper of his mind is well illustrated by the 
following lines which appear in letters writ- 
ten in 1841 : 

I know that God has given me powers such as are 
not given to all, and I will not "hide my talent in 
mean clay." I do not care what others may think of 
me or of my book, because if I am worth anything I 
shall one day show it. I do not fear criticism so 
much as I love truth. Nay, I do not fear it at all. 
In short, I am happy. Maria fills my ideal, and I 
satisfy hers. And I mean to live as one beloved by 
such a woman should live. She is every way noble. 
People have called "Irene" a beautiful piece of po- 
etry. And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her. . . . 
I have just finished something which I ought to have 
done long ago. I have copied off a ballad of mine 
for a publisher of the name of D. H. Williams, who 
is getting out an annual. He will pay me five dollars 
per page, and more if the book sells well. Haw- 
thorne, Emerson, and Longfellow are writing for it, 
and Bryant and Halleck have promised to — so I 
shall be in good company, which will be pleasing to 
groundlings. 

At times Lowell bubbled over with fun 
and animal spirits ; he would then pour out 
sufficient original wit and humor to have 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 193 

supplied a professional humorist with a 
working capital for several years: 

The next day I was up before sunrise, and got into 
a habit of early rising that lasted me all that day. 
... I have nothing else in the way of novelty, ex- 
cept an expedient I hit upon for my hens who were 
backward with their eggs. On rainy days I set Wil- 
liam to reading aloud to them the Lay Sermons of 
Coleridge, and the effect was magical. Whether 
their consciences were touched or they wished to 
escape the preaching, I know not. ... I take great 
comfort in God. I think he is considerably amused 
with us sometimes, but that he likes us, on the whole, 
and would not let us get at the match box so care- 
lessly as he does unless he knew that the frame of 
his universe was fireproof. ... As usual I haven't 
left myself time to correct my proofs. What a 
pleasant life I shall have of it when I have all eter- 
nity on deposit. Then the printers will say, "If you 
can with convenience return proofs before end of 
next century, you would oblige ; but there is no 
hurry." 'Tis an invincible argument for immortality 
that we never have time enough here — except for 
doing other things. 

Again and again Lowell reveals the ex- 
treme affectionateness of his nature: 

You say that life seems to be a struggle after noth- 
ing in particular. But you are wrong. It is a strug- 
gle after the peaceful home of the soul in a natural 



194 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

and loving state of life. Men are mostly uncon- 
scious of the object of their struggle, but it is al- 
ways connected in some way with this. If they gain 
wealth and power or glory, it is all to make up for 
this want, which they feel, but scarce know what it 
is. But nothing will ever supply the place of this, 
any more than their softest carpets will give their 
old age the spring and ease which arose from the pli- 
ant muscles of youth. ... It is always my happiest 
thought that with all the drawbacks of temperament 
(of which no one is more keenly conscious than my- 
self) I have never lost a friend. For I would rather 
be loved than anything else in the world. I always 
thirst after affection, and depend more on the ex- 
pression of it than is altogether wise. 

The strongly altruistic tendencies of 
Lowell's mind are observable in the views 
which he expressed upon the question of 
slavery : 

If men will not set their faces against this mon- 
strous sin, this choragus of all other enormities, they, 
at least, need not smile upon it, much less write in its 
favor. What, in the name of God, are all these pal- 
try parties, which lead men by the nose against all 
that is best and holiest, to the freedom of five mil- 
lions of men? The horror of slavery can only be 
appreciated by one who has felt it himself, or who 
has imagination enough to put himself in the place of 
the slave and fancy himself not only virtually im- 
prisoned, but forced to toil ; and all this for no crime 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 195 

and for no reason except that it would be incon- 
venient to free them. 

That Lowell was possessed of a deeply 
spiritual nature none who are well acquaint- 
ed with his writings will be disposed to 
deny. He seemed to be always conscious 
of the divine Immanence, and undoubtedly 
the sense of God's presence and overruling 
providence lent grandeur and dignity to his 
thought and life. He says: 

I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at 
Mary's, and happening to say something of the pres- 
ence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly 
aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with 
me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the 
whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny 
looming from the abyss. I never before so clearly 
felt the spirit of God in me and around me. The 
whole room seemed to me full of God. The air 
seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of 
something, I knew not what. I spoke with the calm- 
ness and clearness of a prophet. 

Ill his young manhood Lowell was filled 
with the fine and brave enthusiasms of 
youth. His wings were light and strong, 
and to him no height seemed beyond his 
reach. His buoyant spirits responded 



ig6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

swiftly to every change for the better in the 
material circumstances of his life. He 
looked upon his conquest of the world as 
already assured, and the event proved the 
justice of his judgment: 

I have set about making myself ambitious. It is 
the only way to climb well. Men yield more readily 
to an ambitious man, provided he can bear it out by 
deeds. Just as much as we claim the world gives 
us, and posterity has enough to do in nailing the 
base coin to the counter. But I only mean to use 
my ambition as a staff to my love of freedom and 
man. I will have power, and there's the end of it. 
I have a right to it, too, and you see I have put the 
crown on already. 

To the bereaved friend the poet, who 
himself had lost a darling child, and who 
was again to pass through the swelling of 
the great waters, thus addresses himself 
concerning death and sorrow: 

I agree entirely with what you have said of death 
in your last letter ; but at the same time I know well 
that the first touch of his hand is cold, and that he 
comes to us, as the rest of God's angels do, in dis- 
guise. But we are enabled to see his face fully at 
last, and it is that of a seraph. So it is with all. 
Disease, poverty, death, sorrow all come to us with 
unbcnign countenances ; but from one after another 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 197 

the mask falls off, and we behold faces which re- 
tain the glory and the calm of having looked in the 
face of God. To me, at least, your bereavement has 
come with the softest step and the most hallowed 
features, for it has opened a new channel for my love 
to flow toward you in. . . . It is therefore no idle 
form when I tell you to lean on God. I know that 
it is needless to say this to you, but I know also that 
it is always sweet and consoling to have our impulses 
seconded by the sympathy of our friends. 

We all are tall enough to reach God's hand, 
The angels are no taller. 

I could not restrain my tears when I read what you 
say of the living things all around the cast mantle of 
your child. It is strange, almost awful, that, when 
this great miracle has been performed for us, nature 
gives no sign. Not a bee stints his hum, the sun 
shines, the leaves glisten, the cock crow comes from 
the distance, the flies buzz into the room, and yet 
perhaps a minute before the most immediate presence 
of God of which we can conceive was filling the 
whole chamber, and opening its arms to "suffer the 
little ones to come unto him." 

The filial love and reverence that a child 
owes to a worthy parent Lowell has ex- 
pressed in lines which fairly throb with 
warm and deep affection. His portrait of 
his father is as unstudied as it is delightful. 
The manner in which scholars gather knowl- 



ip8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

edge by processes of accretion Lowell has 
indicated with his accustomed freshness 
and originality: 

If you had cast about for a hard question to ask 
me, you could not have been more successful than in 
desiring my advice as to a course of reading. I 
suppose that very few men who are bred scholars 
ever think of such a thing as a course of reading 
after their Freshman year in college. Their situa- 
tion throws books constantly in their way, and they 
select by a kind of instinct the food which will suit 
their mental digestion, acquiring knowledge insen- 
sibly, as the earth gathers soil. This was wholly the 
case with myself. 

Having been taken to task for entertain- 
ing the principles of an abolitionist, and in 
like manner having been accused of one- 
sidedness, Lowell thus proceeds to defend 
himself : 

There is one abolitionist, at least, who seldom lets 
slip any opportunity against any institution which 
seems to him to stand in the way of freedom. Ab- 
solute freedom is what I want — for the body first, 
and then for the mind. For the body first, because it 
is easier to make men conscious of the wrong of 
that grosser and more outward oppression, and, 
after seeing that, they will perceive more readily the 
less palpable chains and gags of tyranny. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 199 

That erratic, irresponsible, iconoclastic 
free lance of letters, Edgar Allan Poe, who 
ran atilt at most of his fellow-writers in his 
own day, did not permit Lowell to escape. 
In common with Longfellow and others 
already eminent in literature, Poe accused 
Lowell of plagiarism. Lowell thus repels 
the charge : 

Poe, I am afraid, is wholly lacking in that ele- 
ment of manhood which, for want of a better name, 
we call "character." It is something quite distinct 
from genius — though all great geniuses are endowed 
with it. ... As I prognosticated, I have made Poe 
my enemy by doing him a service. Poe wishes to 
kick down the ladder by which he rose. He is wel- 
come. But he does not attack me at a weak point. 
He probably cannot conceive of anybody's writing for 
anything but a newspaper reputation, or for post- 
humous fame, which is but the same thing magnified 
by distance. I have quite other aims. 

In this same letter, from which the fore- 
going quotation is made, Lowell permits us 
to look for a moment into the depths of his 
heart, where he reveals his intense longing 
for sympathy and love. Could we gaze be- 
low the cold exterior of many a person 
whose pathway for an instant crosses our 



200 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

own, we doubtless would be astonished to 
learn how, in the largest and purest na- 
tures, this yearning for human fellowship 
rises into a very passion. Lowell's concep- 
tion of the office of a poet was a lofty one. 
His charming and beautiful prose did not 
possess in his own eyes a hundredth part 
of the value of his poetry. His desire was 
to live and be remembered by what he had 
done in the poetic field. He was conscious 
of his high calling, and attained to rare mo- 
ments of prophetic power and vicarious suf- 
fering : 

My calling is clear to me. I am never lifted up to 
any peak of vision — and moments of almost fearful 
inward illumination I have sometimes — but that, 
when I look down in hope to see some valley of the 
Beautiful Mountains, I behold nothing but blackened 
ruins ; and the moans of the downtrodden the world 
over — but chiefly here in our own land — come up to 
my ear, instead of the happy songs of the husband- 
men reaping and binding the sheaves of light ; yet 
these, too, I hear not seldom. Then I feel how great 
is the office of poet, could I but even dare to hope to 
fill it. 

The mutual helpfulness which lies at the 
foundation of all true democracy is not al- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 201 

ways recognized, particularly by those who, 
because of birth, training, and education, 
should be first to embody in their own lives 
the fact that noblesse oblige. But with 
Lowell democracy in its widest and truest 
sense was almost a religion. All great 
genius has been allied with a youthful tem- 
perament that never aged. In fact, genius 
itself, as a subtle prophylactic against time, 
is a preservative of the simple beliefs, elas- 
ticity, and fire of youth, to which the vision 
of the world is ever fair and bright. What- 
ever epigraphs time may score upon the 
brow, or howsoever upon hollow temples 
he may dust his rime, genius permits no 
wrinkles to come upon the heart. The self- 
same hopefulness and high-heartedness of 
early years are borne lightly onward to the 
very end of life. It was so with Lowell. 

How much a matter of conscience Low- 
ell's antislavery sentiments were may be 
discovered from the fact that he was re- 
luctant to receive money for the articles 
which he produced in behalf of the cause so 
dear to his heart. Whatever the acknowl- 



202 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

edged charms of Lowell the author — and 
they are many — they were eclipsed by the 
charming personality of Lowell the man. 
It should ever be thus. The writer who is 
not greater than his writings is a kind of 
impostor, for he creates in the minds of 
others a false conception of himself. That 
Lowell never lost a friend who really knew 
him need not be regarded as surprising. "If 
I did not think that I were better than my 
books," he says, "I should never dream of 
writing another." He cherished a perpet- 
ual and consuming desire to fulfill the ex- 
pectations of his friends. He knew that 
they anticipated great things for him, and 
he set about to realize these anticipations. 
At the same time he felt that his poetical 
power and skill were increasing, and he 
looked into the future with the resilience of 
hope based upon praiseworthy performance. 
His never-failing kindliness of heart and 
invincible good humor helped him over not 
a few of the rough places of life. He was 
able to see the humorous side of almost 
every situation, so that difficulties which 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 203 

would have dismayed many another man 
were for him minified to the vanishing 
point. Nor was he afraid of dealing with 
some of the most perplexing of the ethical 
problems of the world. He looked upon 
human nature with a clear and tolerant eye, 
and he never despaired of the ultimate 
elevation of humanity. His attitude 
toward the Author of the Christian faith 
was one of deepest reverence and unchang- 
ing love. 

Death was not idle in the poet's life. His 
dear children were taken from him, one by 
one — with the exception of his daughter 
Mabel — and all too soon his beautiful and 
beloved wife. In the loss of the latter Low- 
ell drank of the bitterest cup that can be 
pressed to the lips of man. She was a frag- 
ile creature of fire and dew, and the end ap- 
proached so insidiously under cover of a 
constitutional delicacy of health that it took 
the poet by a heartbreaking surprise. This 
great sorrow wore him down, but his faith 
and resignation rose triumphant above the 
affliction. 



204 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

In the opening months of 1855 he was 
elected to a professorship in Harvard Col- 
lege — a chair which had previously been 
occupied by Ticknor and Longfellow. 
Lowell entered upon the duties of his new 
position on his return from Europe, in 1856. 
He continued in this relation for twenty 
years. In 1857 ne a ^ so became editor of the 
Atlantic Monthly, "sitting in the seat of the 
scorner," as he expressed it, for four con- 
secutive years. At the end of this period 
he became associated with Charles Eliot 
Norton in the joint editorship of the North 
American Review. During the soul-trying 
years of our civil war his was a puissant 
voice lifted in defense of the Union. The 
mounting fire and passion of his patriotism 
culminated in the splendid "Commemoration 
Ode," which seems to have been written 
with his very heart's blood. Lowell was al- 
ways pleased at any recognition of his work 
as a poet. He felt that he had in him all 
the elements of the highest poetical achieve- 
ments, and in consequence looked with a 
certain dissatisfaction upon his best pro- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 205 

ductions as falling far below his own ideal 
of excellence and of possibility. He was 
always conscious, also, notwithstanding the 
general buoyancy of his nature, that upon 
him, as upon all great sensitive souls, 
pressed the inescapable weltschmerz which 
haunts these years of time. 

Many of Lowell's utterances might pass 
current as proverbs, so trenchant are they 
and bite with such power into the memory : 

He cannot be a wise man who never says a fool- 
ish thing, and, indeed, I go further, and affirm that 
it takes a wise man to say a foolish thing. . . . We 
never find out on how many insignificant points we 
have fastened the subtile threads of association — 
which is almost love with sanguine temperaments — 
till we are forced to break them. . . . We shall 
never feather our nests from the eagles we have let 
fly. ... It is splendid, as girls say, to dream back- 
ward so. One feels as if he were a poet, and one's 
own Odyssey sings itself in one's blood as he walks. 
. . . What a web a man can spin out of his life, if 
a man be only a genius. ... I have discovered that 
it is almost impossible to learn all about anything 
unless indeed it be some piece of ill-luck, and then 
one has the help of one's friends. . . . But let us 
have a cheerful confidence that we are worth damn- 
ing, for that implies a chance also of something bet- 
ter. ... I believe it one of the most happy things 
14 



206 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

in the world, as we grow older, to have as many ties 
as possible with whatever is best in our own past, 
and to be pledged as deeply as may be to our own 
youth. . . . That friendship should be able to endure 
silence without suspicion is the surest touchstone of 
its sufficiency. ... I have always believed that a 
man's fate is born with him, and that he cannot 
escape from it nor greatly modify it — and that con- 
sequently everyone gets in the long run exactly what 
he deserves, neither more nor less. ... If a man 
does anything good, the world always finds it out, 
sooner or later, and if he doesn't, why, the world 
finds that out, too — and ought to. . . . Women need 
social stimulus more than we [men]. They con- 
tribute to it more, and their magnetism, unless drawn 
off by the natural conductors, turns inward and irri- 
tates. ... I look upon a belief as none the worse, 
but rather the better, for being hereditary, prizing as 
I do whatever helps to give continuity to the being 
and doing of man and an accumulated force to his 
character. . . . They go about to prove to me from 
a lot of nasty savages that conscience is a purely 
artificial product, as if that wasn't the very wonder 
of it. What odds whether it is the thing or the apti- 
tude that is innate? What race of beasts ever got 
one up in all their leisurely aons? ... I don't care 
where the notion of immortality came from. If it 
sprang out of a controlling necessity of our nature, 
some instinct of self-protection and preservation, like 
the color of some of Darwin's butterflies, at any rate 
it is there and as real as that, and I mean to hold 
it fast. 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 20^ 

The unfolding of a commanding intellect 
always presents a fascinating study, and 
hence the writer of these lines has purposely 
lingered over the earlier portion of Lowell's 
life as we find it expressed in his letters. 
His high place as a poet is so widely recog- 
nized that no words in emphasis of that 
fact are needed now. As a critic he brought 
to bear upon his task a kindly disposition, a 
culture broad and exact, and a catholicity 
of taste equaled only by the acumen of his 
mind. His perception of high qualities 
seemed to be instinctive. The slashing, 
swashbuckling style of criticism which pre- 
vailed about the middle of the present cen- 
tury Lowell wholly eschewed, and perhaps 
for the first time on this side of the Atlantic 
there was apparent an earnest and pains- 
taking effort to ascertain the real content of 
a piece of literary art. Over all his writing, 
likewise, in whatever kind, there played an 
ever various and subtle humor like irides- 
cent light. 



VII 

THE LETTERS OF ROBERT 
LOUIS STEVENSON 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 211 



VII 

THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS 
STEVENSON 

We have fallen upon an age of notes and 
notelets. The old leisureliness requisite for 
the cultivation of the epistolary art is ours 
no longer. The demon of haste lurks at 
our elbow, and we no longer take time to 
observe the amenities of friendship. In 
days that are past a letter was at once a 
news-sheet, a record of mental taste and de- 
light, and a flashing mirror of the heart. 
Every word exhaled an aroma of personali- 
ty. Now we receive a few type-written 
lines of colorless language, and we must 
accept them forsooth as a letter. Yet these 
latter years have not been wholly devoid of 
the kindly instincts of the genuine letter- 
writer; and when we turn to the corre- 
spondence of Lowell, the Brownings, Dante 
Rossetti, and Robert Louis Stevenson it is 
like breathing again the atmosphere in 



212 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

which Keats, Cowper, Schiller, and Lamb 
indited letters with a pen dipped in their 
own hearts. 

It is posterity that pronounces final judg- 
ment upon a writer. He may fill a large 
and unique place among his contemporaries, 
and seem to the eyes that look upon his own 
day as destined to a seat among the im- 
mortals, but it is those who come after him 
to whom is committed the ultimate adjudi- 
cation of his claims to remembrance. The 
writer who lacks vitality and a fecund and 
fertilizing power over others will, imme- 
diately that death has vindicated his univer- 
sal sway, quietly slip into the limbo of for- 
getfulness. But he in whose veins life 
warms and riots, who makes his pages 
breathe with a full and healthy scope, who 
appeals to the fundamental instincts and 
loves of humankind, may falter for a little 
while in his march toward the Pantheon of 
perpetual renown, but sooner or later he 
assuredly arrives. 

Robert Louis Stevenson was an artist, 
curious and delightful, dealing with his sub- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 213 

jects in the fresh, joyous, and zestful man- 
ner in which an active-minded boy inspects 
each new object that comes within the ra- 
dius of his experience. In fact, as a writer, 
Stevenson's brave and sunny juvenescence 
is one of his most charming traits. In his 
works he shines forth in many characters ; 
he is a moralist — sometimes of the grave- 
digger type — a poet, a humorist, a Bohe- 
mian, an adventurer, a buccaneer, a prince, 
a beggar, a historian, a traveler, a chron- 
icler of everyday events, a hater of false- 
hoods and shams. He has a clear and forth- 
right way of telling a story, though in him 
the dreamer is strangely united with the 
man of action. A singular intimacy broods 
over his pages, so that he takes at once into 
his confidence those who will listen, how- 
ever briefly, to his words. He loved to 
deal with the elemental passions and qual- 
ities of humankind, as witness Herrick's 
struggle against moral decadence, and Da- 
vis's redemption to righteousness, in The 
Ebb Tide, or the conflict arising in the dual 
nature of every man as portrayed in The 



214 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 
He did not tamely accept all that modern 
society imposes on its devotees. Inwardly 
he chafed, and outwardly was always some- 
thing of a rebel, against the repressive and 
mechanical social conventions which rule 
the present time. In a high degree he was 
impressible to all the experiences of life, 
remembering moods and emotions both sub- 
tle and elusive. His Child's Garden of 
Verses is the chronicle of a childhood pecul- 
iar in its unforgotten imaginative products. 
The aura of a period and a world filled with 
shapes and sounds, too vivid to seem un- 
real, lingered in his memory through all the 
years of his mature manhood. So deeply 
had the scenes and impressions of his early 
life bitten into his mind that his most living 
thoughts were of those days which, to most 
of us, are soon forgotten. 

Stevenson loved those writers of whom 
he said that they had been "eavesdropping 
at the door of his heart." He himself was 
like them. Again and again he draws back 
to his pages those readers whom he attracts 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 215 

ac all, and each time the old charm is re- 
newed with fresh relish and enjoyment. 
This undoubtedly is the test of a writer's 
permanence — the possession of that magic 
whereby a former spell is caused to operate 
upon a reader's heart, he knows not how 
and he cares not why; once drawn within 
the mystic influence of the wizard's circle, 
he surrenders to the power which is upon 
him and takes his intoxication with joy. 
First of all, Stevenson was an artist. He 
knew the value of words. He studied their 
shades and sounds. He understood how to 
make his narratives and descriptions cumu- 
lative in effect. For instance, what can sur- 
pass in beauty and potency the account in 
Prince Otto of Seraphina's spiritual rebap- 
tism in the forest at night? 

At last she began to be aware of a wonderful revo- 
lution, compared to which the fire of Mittwalden 
Palace was but the crack and flash of a percussion 
cap. The countenance with which the pines re- 
garded her began insensibly to change ; the grass, too, 
short as it was, and the whole winding staircase of 
the brook's course, began to wear a solemn fresh- 
ness of appearance. And this slow transfiguration 



2i6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

reached her heart, and played upon it, and trans- 
pierced it with a serious thrill. She looked all 
about; the whole face of nature looked back, brim- 
ful of meaning, finger on lip, leaking its glad secret. 
She looked up. Heaven was almost emptied of stars. 
Such as still lingered shone with a changed and wan- 
ing brightness, and began to faint in their stations. 
And the color of the sky itself was the most wonder- 
ful ; for the rich blue of the night had now melted 
and softened and brightened ; and there had suc- 
ceeded in its place a hue that has no name, and that 
is never seen but as the herald of morning. "O !" 
she cried, joy catching at her voice, "O ! it is the 
dawn !" In a breath she passed over the brook, and 
looped up her skirts and fairly ran in the dim alleys. 
As she ran her ears were aware of many pipings, 
more beatitiful than music ; in the small dish-shaped 
houses in the fork of giant arms, where they had lain 
all night, lover by lover, warmly pressed, the bright- 
eyed, big-hearted singers began to awake for the day. 
Her heart melted and flowed forth to them in kind- 
ness. And they, from their small and high perches 
in the clerestories of the wood cathedral, peered 
down sidelong at the ragged princess as she flitted 
below them on the carpet of the moss and tassel. 

To this artistic quality of Stevenson valu- 
able testimony is borne by Sidney Colvin 
in the following word of reminiscence: 

I remember the late Sir John Millais, a shrewd 
and very independent judge of books, calling across 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 217 

to me at a dinner-table, "You know Stevenson, don't 
you?" and then going on, "Well, I wish you would 
tell him from me, if he cares to know, that to my 
mind he is the very first of living artists. I don't 
mean writers merely, but painters and all of us ; no- 
body living can see with such an eye as that fellow, 
and nobody is such a master of his tools." 

Stevenson's vocabulary was particularly 
rich and noble. To him words were much 
like living things. He loved them not only 
for what they expressed, but for an intrinsic 
value which he was keen to discover. His 
choice of the beautiful and colorful was in- 
tuitive. Some have accused him of em- 
ploying a style which was imitative, or at 
best but a compound of many others. "By 
the way, I have tried to read the Spectator, 
which they all say I imitate, and — it's very 
wrong of me, I know — but I can't. It's all 
very fine, you know, and all that, but it's 
vapid." He was an ardent and sincere stu- 
dent of the world's best literature; but all 
that he received from whatsoever source 
went into the alembic of his own mind, was 
fused in the heat of his own thought, and 
came out Stevenson. He was a maker of 



2i8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

memorable phrases as well as a sane com- 
mentator upon life and conduct: 

"Acts may be forgiven, not even God can forgive 
the hanger-back." "Choose the best if you can; or 
choose the worst; that which hangs in the wind 
dangles from a gibbet." "A fault known is a fault 
cured to the strong; but to the weak it is a fetter 
riveted." "The mean man doubts, the great-hearted 
is deceived." "Shame had a fine bed, but where 
was slumber? Once he was in jail he 'slept.'" 
"Disappointment, except with one's self, is not a very 
capital affair ; and the sham beatitude, 'Blessed is he 
that expecteth little,' one of the truest and, in a 
sense, the most Christlike things in literature." "It 
is much more important to do right than not to do 
wrong ; further, the one is possible, the other has 
always been and will ever be impossible ; and the 
faithful designer to do right is accepted by God ; 
that seems to me to be the Gospel, and that was how 
Christ delivered us from the law." "Ugliness is only 
the prose of horror." "O, if I knew how to omit, I 
would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew 
how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper." 
"To fume and fret is undignified, suicidally foolish, 
and theologically unpardonable ; we are here not to 
make, but to tread predestined pathways ; we are the 
foam of a wave, and to preserve a proper equanimity 
is not merely the first part of submission to God, 
but the chief of possible kindnesses to those about 
us." "The great double danger of taking life too 
easily, and taking it too hard, how difficult it is to 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 219 

balance that !" "The Bible, in most parts, is a cheer- 
ful book ; it is our little piping theologies, tracts, and 
sermons that are dull and dowie." 

Stevenson was a brilliant and entertain- 
ing conversationalist among his friends. 
"He radiates talk," says W. E. Henley, "as 
the sun does light and heat; and after an 
evening — or a week — with him, you come 
forth with a sense of satisfaction in your 
own capacity which somehow proves superi- 
or even to the inevitable conclusion that your 
brilliance was but the reflection of his own, 
and that all the while you were only play- 
ing the part of Rubinstein's piano or Sara- 
sate's violin. " His humanity was so large 
that his friendships were not confined alone 
to those who cultivated the literary life, but 
he bound to him with enduring ties of af- 
fection those who won his regard in various 
fields of activity. He never posed as a 
valetudinarian, nor played on the sympa- 
thies of the public, though he was upon 
perpetual flittings in search of health — now 
in Switzerland, now in the Adirondack 
Mountains, and now in the ends of the 



220 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

earth. "To me," he says, "the medicine bot- 
tles on my chimney and the blood on my 
handkerchief are accidents ; they do not 
color my view of life; and I should think 
myself a trifler and in bad taste if I intro- 
duced the world to these unimportant 
privacies." 

Stevenson came of good stock on both 
his father's and mother's side. His pater- 
nal grandfather was a civil engineer and 
built the Bell Rock lighthouse. The father 
of Robert Louis Stevenson was Thomas, 
the youngest son of Robert Stevenson. Rob- 
ert Louis's mother, from whom he inher- 
ited his delicate constitution, was Margaret 
Isabella Balfour, youngest daughter of Rev. 
Lewis Balfour, minister of the parish of 
Colinton, in Midlothian. Robert Lewis 
Balfour Stevenson, as our novelist was 
christened, was born in Edinburgh, Novem- 
ber 13, 1850. He was an only child, always 
feeble, and subject to extreme nervous ex- 
citement. An eager listener to tales of ad- 
venture and deeds of derring-do, he began 
early to try his hand at composition of his 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 221 

own. He failed to receive much regular 
schooling because of his infirm health. In 
his childhood he was characterized by the 
same power to charm that he so impressed 
upon others in his maturer years. The 
blood of the gypsy seemed to be potent in 
his veins, and he was a wanderer almost to 
the close of his life. It was hoped that he, 
too, would enter the family profession of 
civil engineer. He was entered as a stu- 
dent at Edinburgh University, and attended 
classes there as his health and inclination 
permitted. He was not a hard student at 
college; but in his own desultory way he 
was an ardent devourer of books, and at 
the same time kept his eyes wide open upon 
humankind. His reading ranged the entire 
field of English letters, and he was no stran- 
ger to the literature of other tongues. 

In 1871, though he had manifested a de- 
gree of aptitude for the profession of civil 
engineer, it was concluded that neither his 
physical ability nor personal tastes would 
admit of his following the pursuit of his 

forbears, and he began to study law. He 
15 



222 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

was admitted to the bar in 1875, but he was 
never to follow a lawyer's vocation. Stev- 
enson's parents were of a religious tempera- 
ment, but the novelist early revolted against 
the stern and forbidding aspects of the creed 
which was dominant in his father's house. 
He regarded all dogmatic formulation of 
theological opinions as an expression of the 
universal human need of something divine 
in the presence of the inscrutable mysteries 
which forever infold us here. Thus he soon 
found himself at variance with his father 
upon questions of faith. The father was a 
strictly orthodox, deeply religious Scotch- 
man, with all that the terms imply. The 
son, early imbibing the spirit of freedom 
and toleration, chafed within the narrow 
bounds of the paternal belief, and at length 
broke away altogether, with what heart 
pangs between father and son few can know 
or understand, for they dearly loved each 
other and had been boon companions. Louis 
writes : 

The thunderbolt has fallen with a vengeance now. 
On Friday night, after leaving you, in the course of 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 22$ 

conversation, my father put me one or two questions 
as to beliefs, which I candidly answered. I really 
hate all lying so much now — a new-found honesty 
that has somehow come out of my late illness — that 
I could not so much as hesitate at the time ; but, if I 
had foreseen the real hell of everything since, I 
think I should have lied, as I have done so often be- 
fore. I so far thought of my father, but I had for- 
gotten my mother. And now ! they are both ill, both 
silent, both as down in the mouth as if — I can find 
no simile. You may fancy how happy it is for me. 
If it were not too late, I think I could almost find it 
in my heart to retract, but it is too late ; and, again, 
am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of 
course it is rougher than hell upon my father, but 
can I help it? They don't see, either, that my game 
is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not — as 
they call me — a careless infidel. I believe as much 
as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio ; I am, 
I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I 
have not come hastily to my views. I reserve — as I 
told them — many points until I acquire fuller infor- 
mation, and do not think I am thus justly to be 
called "horrible atheist." . . . Here is a good heavy 
cross with a vengeance, and all rough with rusty 
nails that tear your fingers, only it is not I that have 
to carry it alone ; I hold the light end, but the heavy 
burden falls on these two. 

He seems to recur to this unhappy period 
in his life in his portraiture of Weir of 
Hermistojij when he says: 



224 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Sympathy is not due to these steadfast iron na- 
tures. If he [the old judge] failed to gain his son's 
friendship, or even his son's toleration, on he went 
up the great bare staircase of his duty, uncheered 
and undepressed. There might have been more 
pleasure in his relations with Archie, so much he 
may have recognized at moments ; but pleasure was 
a by-product of the singular chemistry of life, which 
only fools expected. 

As an example of his early power of de- 
scription and his growing habit of observa- 
tion, the following, written at eighteen, is 
an adequate specimen. In a letter to his 
mother he says: 

To the south, however, is as fine a piece of coast 
scenery as I ever saw. Great black chasms, huge 
black cliffs, rugged and overhung gullies, natural 
arches, and deep green pools below them, almost too 
deep to let you see the gleam of sand among the 
darker weed ; there are deep caves, too. In one of 
these lives a tribe of gypsies. The men are always 
drunk, simply and truthfully always. From morning 
to evening the great villainous-looking fellows are 
either sleeping off the last debauch or hulking about 
the cave "in the horrors." The cave is deep, high, 
and airy, and might be made comfortable enough. 
But they just live among heaped bowlders, damp with 
continual droppings from above, with no more fur- 
niture than two or three tin pans, a truss of rotten 
Straw, and a few ragged cloaks. In winter the surf 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 225 

bursts into the mouth and often forces them to aban- 
don it. 

Already his was a deft hand at character- 
ization, as evidenced in the following ex- 
tract from his pen : 

Seven p. m. found me at Breadalbane Terrace, clad 
in spotless blacks, white tie, shirt, et cetera, and fin- 
ished off below with a pair of navvies' boots. How 
true that the devil is betrayed by his feet ! A mes- 
sage to Cummy at last. Why, O treacherous woman, 
were my dress boots withheld? Dramatis persona ; 
pere R., amusing, long-winded, in many points like 
papa ; mere R., nice, delicate, likes hymns, knew Aunt 
Margaret (t' ould man knew Uncle Alan) ; tille R., 
nominee "Sara" (no h), rather nice, lights up well, 
good voice, interested face ; Miss L., nice also, 
washed out a little, and, I think, a trifle sentimental ; 
fils R., in a Leith office, smart, full of happy epithet, 
amusing. They are very nice and very kind — asked 
me to come back — "any night you feel dull ; and any 
night doesn't mean no night : we'll be so glad to see 
you." C'est la mere qui parle. 

In the same letter there are intimations of 
his later and mature style: "As my senses 
slowly flooded, I heard the whistling and 
the roaring of wind, and the lashing of 
gust-blown and uncertain flaws of rain. I 
got up, dressed, and went out. The mizzled 



226 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

sky and rain blinded you. ... I stood a 
long while on the cope watching the sea be- 
low me ; I hear its dull, monotonous roar at 
this moment below the shrieking of the 
wind." 

The prevision of his early death is re- 
corded again and again; not in any mawk- 
ish or sentimental manner, but as a thing 
already understood and accepted. The 
mingled gayety and melancholy which un- 
derlay his nature break forth quite spon- 
taneously in the early letters which he in- 
dited to interested and affectionate friends: 
"When I am a very old and very respectable 
citizen, with white hair and bland manners 
and a gold watch, I shall hear crows cawing 
in my heart, as I heard them this morning. 
I vote for old age and eighty years of retro- 
spect. Yet, after all, I dare say, a short 
shrift and a nice green grave are about as 
desirable." 

In 1873 Stevenson's health quite broke 
down, and upon the advice of physicians he 
journeyed to the southern part of France. 
From this experience emanated his essay 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 227 

"Ordered South," which was his first con- 
tribution to Macmillan's Magazine. At 
twenty-three years of age the future essay- 
ist and noveliest is already foreshadowed: 

I must tell you a thing I saw to-day. I was going 
down to Portobello in the train, when there came 
into the next compartment (third class) an artisan, 
strongly marked with smallpox, and with sunken, 
heavy eyes — a face hard and unkind, and without 
anything lovely. There was a woman on the plat- 
form seeing him off. At first sight, with her one 
eye blind and the whole cast of her features strongly 
plebeian, and even vicious, she seemed as unpleasant 
as the man ; but there was something beautifully soft, 
a sort of light of tenderness, as on some Dutch Ma- 
donna, that came over her face when she looked at 
the man. They talked for a while together through 
the window ; the man seemed to have been asking 
money. "Ye ken the last time," she said, "I gave 
ye two shillin's for your ludgin', and ye said — 
it died off into whisper. Plainly, Falstaff and 
Dame Quickly over again. The man laughed un- 
pleasantly, even cruelly, and said something ; and the 
woman turned her back on the carriage and stood a 
long while so, and, do what I might, I could catch no 
glimpse of her expression, although I thought I saw 
the heave of a sob in her shoulders. At last, after 
the train was already in motion, she turned round 
and put two shillings into his hand. I saw her stand 
and look after us with a perfect heaven of love on 
her face — this poor one-eyed Madonna — until the 



228 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

train was out of sight; but the man, sordidly happy 
with his gain, did not put himself to the inconveni- 
ence of one glance to thank her for her ill-deserved 
kindness. 

Here is another side of life which Steven- 
son portrays, and which reveals him in the 
character he always preserved as a clean 
man: 

I shall tell you a story. Last Friday I went down 
to Portobello, in the heavy rain, with an uneasy wind 
blowing par rafales off the sea — or, "en rafales," 
should it be? or what? As I got down near the 
beach a poor woman, oldish, and seemingly, lately at 
least, respectable, followed me and made signs. She 
was drenched to the skin, and looked wretched below 
wretchedness. You know, I did not like to look 
back at her ; it seemed as if she might misunderstand 
and be terribly hurt and slighted ; so I stood at the 
end of the street — there was no one else within sight 
in the wet — and lifted up my hand very high with 
some money in it. I heard her steps draw heavily 
near behind me, and, when she was near enough 
to see, I let the money fall in the mud and went off 
at my best walk without ever turning round. There 
is nothing in the story ; and yet you will understand 
how much there is, if one chose to set it forth. You 
see, she was so ugly ; and you know there is some- 
thing terribly, miserably pathetic in a certain smile, 
a certain sodden aspect of invitation on such faces. 
It is so terrible, that it is in a way sacred ; it means 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 229 

the outside of degradation and — what is worst of all 
in life — false position. I hope you understand me 
rightly. 

Stevenson's first meeting with Mr. W. E. 
Henley was in circumstances unusual and 
pathetic, the latter lying ill in a hospital 
from which he did not emerge for many 
weary days. The friendship thus formed 
continued until the end of the novelist's 
life. In this connection it is interesting to 
recall Mr. Henley's unique and satisfying 
series of poems entitled In Hospital, which 
could have been written only by one who 
had suffered the extremes of pain and lan- 
guor and had passed through the scenes so 
vividly and adequately represented. Stev- 
enson writes: 

Yesterday, Leslie Stephen, who was down here to 
lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poor 
fellow, a poet who writes for him, and who has been 
eighteen months in our infirmary, and may be, for 
all I know, eighteen months more. It was very sad 
to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and 
a couple of sick children in the other bed. A girl 
came in to visit the children, and played dominoes 
on the counterpane with them ; the gas flared and 
crackled, and the fire burned in a dull economical 



230 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and 
the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and 
beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he 
had been in a king's palace or the great King's pal- 
ace of the blue air. He has taught himself two lan- 
guages since he has been lying there. I shall try to 
be of use to him. 

Stevenson's earliest thought of the South 
Sea islands as a sort of "earthly paradise" 
for the sick, wayworn, and weary is thus 
awakened, to be cherished in silence for 
more than fifteen years : 

Awfully nice man here to-night. Public servant — 
New Zealand. Telling us all about the South Sea 
islands till I was sick with desire to go there ; beau- 
tiful places, green forever ; perfect climate ; perfect 
shapes of men and women, with red flowers in their 
hair ; and nothing to do but to study oratory and eti- 
quette, sit in the sun, and pick up the fruits as they 
fall. Navigator's Island is the place ; absolute balm 
for the weary. 

Our author triumphantly passed his ex- 
amination for the bar at Edinburgh, but for 
him had been ordained something better 
than the law. In 1876, in company with 
Sir Walter Simpson, Stevenson undertook 
the canoe trip which resulted in the volume, 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 231 

An Inland Voyage. The open air, the de- 
lightful and various scenery, together with 
companionship of an agreeable nature, in- 
duced an almost boyish happiness and peace 
of mind. In 1878 occurred the autumnal 
tramp through the Cevennes chronicled so 
charmingly in Travels with a Donkey. Dur- 
ing all this time he was more or less ailing, 
and occasionally he fell into black moods 
of despondency; but from these he quickly 
rallied, continuing his activities without 
pause, accomplishing the maximum of work 
despite his enfeebled physical condition, 
and so finally entering with assurance upon 
his chosen career of letters. 

Stevenson first met in France the lady — 
Mrs. Osborne — who was afterward to be- 
come his wife. She had been unhappy in 
her domestic circumstances, and returning 
to her home in California, she determined 
to seek a divorce from her husband. Stev- 
enson, hearing of Mrs. Osborne's intention, 
started for America, resolved to risk all in 
his attempt to support himself, and pos- 
sibly a family, by literature alone. In San 



232 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

Francisco, while waiting for affairs to un- 
ravel themselves with regard to his pro- 
jected matrimonial adventure, he knew the 
pinch of real want. For a brief and unsuc- 
cessful period he was a reporter upon a 
San Francisco daily paper; often he was 
fairly in want of food ; sick and all but pen- 
niless, a stranger in a strange land — -this 
episode was the most distressing of his life. 
He himself thus recalls it : "I have to drop 
from a fifty cent to a twenty-five cent din- 
ner; to-day begins my fall. That brings 
down my outlay in food and drink to forty- 
five cents, or is. 10J/2 d. per day. How are 
the mighty fallen ! Luckily this is such a 
cheap place for food." He was united in 
wedlock with the woman of his choice in 
May, 1880. Of his marriage he writes : "It 
was not my bliss that I was interested in 
when I was married ; it was a sort of mar- 
riage in extremis; and if I am where I am, 
it is thanks to the care of that lady who 
married me when I was a mere complica- 
tion of cough and bones, much fitter for an 
emblem of mortality than a bridegroom." 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 233 

Stevenson arrived at his judgments by 
the way of his own modes of thinking and 
observing. His eyes as well as his mind 
were wide open, nor was his outlook upon 
the world that of the confirmed valetudina- 
rian. He loved nature for its own sake, 
while his' devotion to his kind was no less 
complete and intense. His spirits drooped 
low at times, as his fluctuating health 
dragged down the frayed and feeble body, 
but returning strength would restore his 
old vein of gayety. His sympathy and ten- 
derness are shown again and again. On 
his emigrant trip across the plains he takes 
care of a babe for hours, that the weary 
mother may enjoy a rest. In San Fran- 
cisco his heart is torn at the dying of a little 
child: 

My landlord's and landlady's little four-year-old 
child is dying in the house ; and O, what he has suf- 
fered ! It has really affected my health. O never, 
never, any family for me ! I am cured of that. . . . 
Excuse this scratch ; for the child weighs on me, dear 
Colvin. I did all I could to help ; but all seems lit- 
tle, to the point of crime, when one of these poor in- 
nocents lies in such misery. 



234 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

His literary likings were prompted by 
his delight in the craft which was dear to 
him as life itself. Thus he says: 

An art is a fine fortune, a palace in a park, a band 
of music, health, and physical beauty ; all but love to 
any worthy practicer. I sleep upon my art for a pil- 
low ; I waken in my art ; I am unready for death, 
because I hate to leave it. I love my wife. I do not 
know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her ; 
but, while I can conceive of being widowed, I refuse 
the offering of life without my art. I am not but in 
my art ; it is me ; I am the body if it merely. 

He was an austere critic of himself, not 
even his best work satisfying his exacting 
requirements or fulfilling his lofty ideal. 
No critic could point out to him any failure 
in his work of which he himself was not 
first aware. He was a stylist, it is true — 
what man is not who loves and studies the 
exquisite art of composition. Now and 
then he declares against style in favor of 
something else, but he gave unremitting 
attention not only to what he had to say, 
but how he said it; and, like every other 
artist, he knew well when he had done a 
good piece of work, and was filled accord- 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 235 

ingly with a generous glow and satisfac- 
tion. Few, perhaps none others, could 
have achieved what he did under disad- 
vantages so great and continuous. He was 
wont to regard himself as a slow artificer 
in letters, but his slowness was rather in in- 
vention than in composition. He says: "I 
am still 'a slow study,' and sit a long while 
silent on my eggs. Unconscious thought, 
there is the only method; macerate your 
subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid 
off and look in — and there your stuff is, 
good or bad." Though he loved his tools, 
and wrought like a lover with them, he was 
occasionally haunted by the thought that 
his art might sometimes be too palpable. In 
his ordinary correspondence with his inti- 
mate friends there was scarcely a letter in 
which did not appear some striking allusion 
to books or bookmen, or to those who had 
labored before, or were laboring with him, 
in his chosen field. In every instance, the 
obiter dicta could have come only from an 
earnest student of life and letters. 

Stevenson returned to England and Scot- 



236 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

land in August, 1880, taking his new wife 
with him ; thence he went to spend the win- 
ter in Switzerland. Returning to Scotland 
the following summer, he made an ineffect- 
ual attempt to secure the chair of history 
and constitutional law in the University of 
Edinburgh. Repairing to Switzerland in 
the autumn of 1881, he finished Treas- 
ure Island, The Silverado Squatters, and 
some of his most fortunate essays for the 
magazines. It is not possible here to fol- 
low in detail the endless journeyings of 
this frail man of letters in search of health. 
There is something pathetic but immeasur- 
ably courageous in this invalid author la- 
boring always under difficulties, at times 
and for weeks together so feeble that he was 
forbidden even to speak lest the dreadful 
hemorrhages of the lungs should recur, in- 
domitably gay, sweet, and debonair, pray- 
ing only for strength that he might work 
and earn his daily bread. Stevenson's fa- 
ther bought for him a house at Bourne- 
mouth, England, which the novelist named 
Skerryvore, from one of the sea towns of 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 237 

the Hebrides, and in commemoration of 
one of his father's most notable engineer- 
ing achievements. Here, though constant- 
ly in a precarious physical condition, he 
produced between the years 1884 and 1887 
some of his best and most characteristic 
work. 

In January, 1886, appeared The Strange 
Case of. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which at 
once attracted wide attention; in the same 
year appeared Kidnapped, which repeated 
the success of the earlier production, and 
which Stevenson himself was wont to re- 
gard as the high-water mark of his crea- 
tions. In August, 1887, his uncertain 
health made it necessary to try again a 
change of climate; accordingly, with his 
family, he came to the United States and 
spent seven months at Saranac Lake, in 
the Adirondack Mountains. In America, 
for the first time, he tasted the full sweets 
of a not unwelcome popularity, yet no 
man was ever more unspoiled by success 
than he. 

Like most men of genius, Stevenson pro- 

16 



238 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

jected many works, few of which were actu- 
ally accomplished, his delicate health and 
teeming brain interrupting and diverting 
his labors. Whatever he touched sprang 
into life. He had in him the power to put 
a warm, red, pulsing heart beneath the ribs 
of death. He was devoid of any petty jeal- 
ousy toward men of his own profession. 
He recognized and rejoiced in all good 
work, from whatever source, with a fine 
and generous relish. In him there was a 
deep-lying vein of religious feeling, not of 
the cant kind, but healthful, manly, and re- 
served. Occasionally he seems to speak as 
an unbeliever, but at the core of him the 
essentials of the rugged faith of his native 
land were really vital and dominant. His 
distinction between the religious man and 
the pious man is finely drawn, but like him- 
self in the originality of the point of view. 
His constant migrations and his oft-re- 
curring and dangerous illness brought him 
to look upon death with no terror, but with 
the equanimity of a Christian and a philoso- 
pher ; and when he expresses resignation it 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 239 

is not the resignation of either apathy or 
despair. 

In his own way Stevenson was interested 
in questions of politics, and all matters of 
public concern received his intelligent and 
critical attention. Like many other men of 
genius he was not a model in the conduct of 
business affairs. He was generous to his 
friends, and his purse was ever open to 
unfortunate men of the pen or the press. 
His bete noire was the wind, probably be- 
cause of the weakness of his lungs. It is 
interesting to observe how, again and again, 
in his correspondence as well as in his sto- 
ries and essays, he speaks of the wind, and 
almost always with disfavor, though for 
the various scenes and nearly all the moods 
of nature he cherished an abiding affection. 
He was possessed of an old and rooted be- 
lief that he should die by drowning ; which 
is but another instance of the fact that even 
ancient and persistent impressions are not 
to be relied upon, and may finally partake 
of the character of superstitions. He never 
outgrew some phases of his childhood, and 



2 4 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

the heart in his bosom was susceptible to 
youthful pastimes and enthusiasms to the 
very last: 

When a man seemingly sane tells me he has "fallen 
in love with stagnation," I can only say to him, 
"You will never be a pirate!" This may not cause 
any regret to Mrs. Monkhouse ; but in your own soul 
it will clang hollow — think of it ! Never ! After 
all boyhood's aspirations and youth's immortal day- 
dreams, you are condemned to sit down, grossly draw 
in your chair to the fat board, and be a beastly bur- 
gess till you die. Can it be? Is there not some 
escape, some furlough from the moral law, some holi- 
day jaunt contrivable into a better land? Shall we 
never shed blood ? This prospect is too gray. 

The idea of yachting had brooded long- 
in Stevenson's mind, and at length culmi- 
nated in an extended cruise in the schooner 
Casco among the South Sea islands. He 
had determined to invest ten thousand dol- 
lars in this sailing trip, from which he was 
destined never to return to the shores of 
England or America. It was on June 28, 
1888, that he started from the harbor of 
San Francisco. After cruising about for 
several months he arrived, near Christmas 
time, at Honolulu, where he remained for 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 241 

six months. During this period he visited 
the leper colony at Molokai. His fine 
thoughtfulness and quick sympathy are 
beautifully shown in a letter to his wife : 

Presently we came up with the leper promontory — 
lowland, quite bare and bleak and harsh, a little town 
of wooden houses, two churches, a landing stair, all 
unsightly, sour, northerly, lying athwart the sunrise, 
with the great wall of the pali cutting the world out 
on the south. Our lepers were sent on the first boat, 
about a dozen, one poor child very horrid, one white 
man, leaving a large grown family behind him in 
Honolulu, and then into the second stepped the sis- 
ters and myself. I do not know how it would have 
been with me had the sisters not been there. My 
horror of the horrible is about my weakest point ; 
but the moral loveliness at my elbow blotted all else 
out ; and when I found that one of them was crying, 
poor soul, quietly under her veil, I cried a little my- 
self ; then I felt as right as a trivet, only a little 
crushed to be there so uselessly. I thought it was 
a sin and a shame she should feel unhappy ; I turned 
round to her and said something like this : "Ladies, 
God himself is here to give you welcome. I'm sure 
it is good for me to be beside you ; I hope it will be 
blessed to me ; I thank you for myself and the good 
you do me." It seemed to cheer her up ; but indeed 
I had scarce said it when ,ve were at the landing 
stairs, and there was a great crowd, hundreds of 
(God save us!) pantomime masks in poor human 
flesh, waiting to receive the sisters and the new 
patients. 



242 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

His pen picture of Father Damien is in- 
deed most striking: 

Of old Damien, of whose weaknesses and worse 
perhaps I heard fully, I think only the more. It was 
a European peasant — dirty, bigoted, untruthful, un- 
wise, tricky, but superb with generosity, residual 
candor and fundamental good humor : convince him 
he had done wrong — it might take hours of insult — 
and he would undo what he had done and like his 
corrector better. A man with all the grime and 
paltriness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the 
more for that. 

Determined to renew his yachting expe- 
ence, in June, 1889, he left Honolulu, in the 
schooner Equator, bound to the Gilberts, in 
the western Pacific. Toward Christmas of 
the same year he reached Samoa. Here he 
bought the future Vailima on the mountain 
side, above Apia. He departed for Sydney, 
from which place, after a serious illness, he 
entered upon a devious voyage, in the trad- 
ing steamer Janet Nicoll, among various 
remote islands. He finally returned to his 
Samoan property, where work had been 
going forward during his absence. He 
lived at Vailima from 1890 until the time of 



LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 243 

his death, four years later. His days there 
were passed with great zest in multiplied 
occupation. The natives knew him by the 
musical name of Tusitala, "teller of tales." 
In the year 1892 his health again broke 
sadly. Trips to Sydney and to Honolulu 
failed to benefit him, and his energies be- 
gan to flag. His annual income during the 
last few years of his life was between $20,- 
000 and $25,000, but his generosity was 
boundless, and he saved little. In the few 
months previous to the close of his life he 
seemed to be filled with a great weariness 
and to experience premonitions of his early 
decease. 

The end came suddenly on the 3d of De- 
cember, 1894. Stevenson had been work- 
ing on Weir of Hermiston at the height of 
his powers. All the morning he had 
wrought in a glow of satisfaction which 
only the true artist can feel. At evening, 
while he was in the most buoyant spirits, 
he was struck down. His loved ones stood 
about him, watching the ebbing away of 
the life so dear to all — drinking the deep 



244 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 

bitterness of that hour when human impo- 
tency is most sharply felt in the presence 
of the dissolution of nature's fondest ties. 
"He died at ten minutes past eight on Mon- 
day evening, the 3d of December, in the for- 
ty-fifth year of his age." The burial took 
place in the afternoon of the succeeding 
day. His dust lies on the summit of a 
mountain of his well-loved Samoa until the 
dawning of that morning when God shall 
summon all earth's sleepers to awake. 

At his death Stevenson left two incom- 
plete stories, St. Ives and Weir of Hermis- 
ton, both of these among the best products 
of his pen. His art ripened and improved 
to the very last. St. Ives was completed by 
Mr. A. T. Quiller-Couch, and Weir of Her- 
miston by Mr. Sidney Colvin, the latter 
adding one or two brief notes to the un- 
finished story. 



INDEX 



Abolitionist, 198. 

"Accontius and Cydippe, The 

Story of," 69. 
"Adam Bede, 42, 124, 125, 126, 

128, 143. 
Adirondack Mountains, 219, 237. 
"Adonais," 96. 
Adonis, 96. 

"yEneid of Virgil, 73, 90. 
"./Eschylus," 99. 
Aldworth, 30, 43. 
Alford, Dean, 19. 
Allingham, William, 10. 
American Constitution, 18, 32. 
Andover, 187. _ 
"Another Spring," 168. 
Anstey, 41. 

"Antiquary, The," 53. 
Apia, 242. 

Apostles, Society of, 20. 
Arbury Farm, 116. 
Argyll, Duke of, 11. 
Arnold, Matthew, n. 
"Arts of Life, The Lesser," 63. 
Atalanta's Race, 68. 
Atlantic Monthly, 204. 
Austen, Jane, 145. 

Bacon, 19. 
Baldasarre, 130. 
Balfour, Rev. Lewis, 220. 
Balfour, Margaret Isabella, 220. 
"Banded Men, The Story of 

the," 72. 
Barrie, J. M., 42. 
Baudelaire, 155. 
Beattie, 179. 
" Becket," 39. 

" Bellerophon at Argos," 69. 
" Bellerophon in Lysia," 69. 
Bell Rock Lighthouse, 220. 
Besant, Walter, 41. 
Bexley Heath, 62. 
Bible, The, 180, 219. 
" Biglow Papers," 186, 191. 
Birchington-on-Sea, 164. 



Black, William, 41. 
Blackmore, R. D., 42. 
Blackstone, 185. 
Blackwood's Magazine, 94, 118, 

132. 
Blakesley, Dean, 19, 21. 
" Blessed Damozel, The," 153. 
Bonaparte, 103. 
Boswell, 45. 
Bournemouth, 236. 
Boxley, 27. 
Braddon, Miss, 42. 
Brawne, Fanny, 104. 
Brazil, 66. 

Bronte, Charlotte, 138, 145. 
Brookfield, 16, 19. 
Broughton, Miss, 42. 
Brown, Oliver Madox, 156, 164. 
Browning, Mrs., 56, 144, 145, 167, 

175, 211. 
Browning, Robert, 10, 42, 56, 119, 

156, 162, 175, 211. 
Bryant, 192. 

Buchanan, Robert, 161, 162. 
"Bucolics," Virgil's, 179. 
Buller, Charles, 19. 
Burne-Jones, Edward, 54, 56, 

58, 59- 
Burns, 183. 

Burton, Sir Frederick, 135. 
Byron, Lord, 15, 16, 42, 91, 96, 

99, i°3, 179- 



Caine, Hall, 42, 163. 

Caius Cestius, 112. 

California, 231. 

Cambridge, 187. 

Carlyle, Mrs. 47. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 10, 20, 45, 46, 

138, 175, 182. 
Carroll, Lewis, 162. 
Casaubon, Dorothea, 120. 
Casco, schooner, 240. 
Cavaliers, 184, 185. 
Celtic race, 31. 
Cevennes, 231. 
245 



246 



INDEX 



Chambers, 95. 

Chapman, George, 117. 

Charmian, 103, 104, 106. 

Chaucer, 17, 51, 53, 67, 88, 91. 

"Child Christopher and Goldi- 
lind, Of," 79. 

"Child's Garden of Verses, A, v 
214. 

Chingford Hatch, 53. 

Chopin, Frederic, 8. 

Christ, 34, 35, 37, 107, 218. 

Christianity, 33, 35. 

''Christianity, Essence of," 117 

Clark, Cowden, 91. 

Clarke, 90. 

Cleopatra, 103. 

Clough, A. H., 11. 

Coleridge, 11 1, 193. 

Colinton, 220. 

Collinson, 152. 

Colvin, Sidney, 216, 244. 

" Commemoration Ode," Low- 
ell's, 184, 204. 

Concord, 182, 187. 

Contemporary Review, 161. 

Court of St. James, 186. 

Coventry, 116. 

Cowley, 179. 

Cowper, 175, 181, 212. 

Crawford, Marion, 41. 

Crockett, 125. 

Cromwell, 184. 

Cross, J. W., ii<;, 140. 

"Cupid and Psyche, The Story 
of," 69. 

Damien, Father, 242. 

" Daniel Deronda,' 128, 140. 

Dante, 179. 

Darwin, Charles, 8, 21, 206. 

" Death of Paris, The," 69. 

De Vere, Aubrey, 11, 40. 

Deverell, Walter Howell, 160. 

Dickens, 115, 125, 145. 

Divine Personality, 36. 

Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), 162. 

" Don Juan," 96. 

" Doom of King Acrisius, The, 

68. 
"Dora," 47. 
Doyle, Conan, 42, 125, 
Durer, Albert, 59. 

" Ebb Tide, The," 213. 



Edinburgh, 220, 230. 

Eliot, George, 39, 42, 45, 115 et 

seq. 
Elmwood, 177, 180. 
Ely, Dean of, 19. 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29, 119, 

175, 182, 192. 
1 Endymion," 94, 95, 96. 
English Illustrated Magazine, 

Macmillan's, 78, 227. 
Epping Forest, 27, 52, 53. 
Equator, schooner, 242. 

Ere Dwellers, The Story of 

the," 72. 
Essex, 53. 
Evans, Mary Ann (George Eliot), 

115- 
Evans, Robert, 116. 
"Eve of St. Agnes, The," 97. 
Exeter College, 54. 

" Fable for Critics," 191. 

" Faerie Queene, The," 179. 

Fairlop Oak, 52. 

Falstaff, 227. 

Farringford, 30. 

" Felix Holt/' 128, 143. 

Feuerbach, 117. 

" Fifine at the Fair," 162. 

Fitzgerald, Edward, 10, 14, 17,45. 

" Fleshly School of Poetry, The, ' 

161. 
Florence, 128, 130. 
Forman, Buxton, 72. 
Forster, John, 11. 
" Fostering of Aslaug, The," 69. 
"Frithiof the Bold, The Stoiy 

of," 72. 
Froissart, Chronicles of, 56. 
Froude, 48. 
Fytche, Elizabeth, 15, 17, 18. 

Gifford, 93, 94, 96. 

Gilberts (islands), 242. 

"Gilfil's Love Story, Mr.," 122, 

123. 
Gilman, Mrs., 189. 
Gladstone, W. E., 8, 10, 22, 30, 

138. 
" Glittering Plain, The Story of 

the," 78. 
" Goblin Market," 167. 
Godwin, 92. 
Goethe, 31, 44, 87, 100. 



INDEX 



247 



"Goethe, Life of," 132. 

" Golden Apples, The," 69. 

Gothic Architecture, 53. 

Greek Mythology, 90. 

" Grettir the Strong, The Story 

of," 72. 
Griff, 116. 
"Guggum," 161. 
"Guinevere," 33, 45^ 
"Guinevere, The Defense of," 

59, 61, 66, 68. 

Hale End, 52. 

Hallam, Arthur, 11, 19, 22, 25, 27. 

Hallam, Henry, 11. 

Halleck, 192. 

Hampden, 184. 

Hardy, Thomas, 41, 138. 

" Harold," 39. 



Harvard, 178, 204. 

Harvard Law School, 189. 

Hawthorne, 125, 192. 

Haydon, 92. 

Hazlitt, 88, 92. 

Heath, Douglas, 19, 21. 

" Heath Slayings, The Story of 

the," 72. 
Hebrides, The, 237. 
Henley, W. E., 219, 229. 
" Hen Thorir, The Story of," 72. 
High Beech, 27. 
Highgate Cemetery, 141. 
" Hill of Venus, The," 69. 
Hippocrene, Fountain of, 188. 
" Hogni and Hedinn, The Tale 

of," 72. 
Holmes, O. W., 8. 
Honolulu, 240, 242, 243. 
Hooker, Bishop, 103. 
Hope, Anthony, 125. 
Hope (poet), 179. 
Horace, 138, 179. 
Houghton, Lord. (See Milnes, 

Richard Moncton.) 
" House of Life, The," 159. 
"House of the Wolfings, A Tale 

of the," 78. 
"Howard the Halt, The Story 

of," 72. 
Howard, John, 103. 
Howitt, Mary, 45. 
"How Lisa Loved the King," 137. 
Hunt, Holman, 152. 
Hunt, Leigh, 90, 92, no, 112. 



" Hunting of the Snark, The," 

162. 
Huxley, 40. 
"Hyperion," 99. 

" Idylls of the King," 33, 59, 61. 

" Inland Voyage, An, 231. 

" In Hospital, 229. 

" In Memoriam," n, 30. 

" Irene," 192. 

James, Henry, 41. 
Janet Nicoll, schooner, 242. 
"Janet's Repentance," 123. 
"Jason, The Life and Death of," 

66, 71. 
;;jenny"i57 

Jesus, Life of," 117. 
Jex-Blake, 58. 
Job, Book of, 34. 
Johnson, Lionel, 78. 
Jowett. Benjamin, 10, 28, 44. 
"July/' 69. 

Keats, John, 42, 85 et seq., 155, 

175, 212. 
Kelmscott, 51, 71, 80, 163. 
Kemble, J. M., 10, 19, 21. 
" Kidnapped," 237. 
King Arthur, 33. 
King's College, 151. 
Kingsley, 115, 125. 
Korner, 90, 101, 109. 

Ladislaw, Will, 120. 

" Lady of the Land, The," 69. 

Lamb, Charles, 138, 212. 

M Land East of the Sun," etc., 69. 

Landor, 175. 

Lawless, Miss, 42. 

" Lay Sermons," Coleridge's, 193. 

Lear, Edward, 10. 

" Legend of Jubal, The," 137. 

Lempriere's Dictionary, 90. 

" Les Miserables," 143. 

Lewes, George H., 39, 117, 118, 

.13^ J 33i, J 34, MO1 141- 
Lincoln, Abraham, 8. 
Lincoln, Blakesley, Dean of, 19. 
Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 134, 

135. 141. 
London Chronicle, The, 142. 
London, Trench, Archbishop of, 

19. 



248 



INDEX 



Longfellow, 192, 109, 204. 

Loring, G. B., 179, 189. 

" Love is Enough, 71. 

" Love of Alcestis, The," 69. 

" Lovers of Gudrun, The," 69. 

" Love's Nocturn," 165. 

Lowell, James Russell, 175 et 

seq., 211. 
Lowell, Mabel, 203. 
Lowell, Robert, 177. 
Lushington, Edmund, 21, 45. 
Lushington, Vernon, 58. 
Lyall, Edna, 42. 
Lydgate, Rosamond, 120. 
Lytton, 115. 

Macaulay, 138. 

Maitland, Thomas (Robert Buch- 
anan), 161. 

Majendie, Lady Margaret, 42. 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 56. 

"Man Born to be King, The," 68. 

" Man Who Never Laughed 
Again, The," 69. 

Marlborough, 53. 

Marston Philip Bourke, 156. 

" Maud, ' 30, 43. 

Maurice, Frederick D., 10. 

Melema, Tito, 129, 135. 

Mendelssohn, Felix, 8. 

Meredith, George, 41, 119, 138, 
163. 

Merivale, Dean of Ely, 19. 

Methodism in England, 125. 

Methodists, 124. 

Middle Ages, 55. 

" Middlemarch," 120, 128, 140, 
143. 

Midlothian, 220. 

Millais, 152, 216. 

Mill, John Stuart, 117. 

" Mill on the Floss, The," 128. 

Milnes, Richard Moncton, 8, 10, 
19, 38, 103. 

Muton, 33, 42, 179, 184. 

Minerva, 124. 

11 Minstrel, The," 179. 

" Miscellanies," Carlyle's, 183. 

Molokai, 241. 

Monkbarns, 53. 

Montagu, Basil, 92. 

Montaigne, 119. 

Monteith, 19. 

*' Moosehead Journal," 176. 



Morley, John, 70. 

Morris and Co., Decorators, 62. 

Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and 

Co., 64. 
Morris, William, 51 et seq., 155. 
"Morte d'Arthur," 56. 
''My Confidences," 134. 

Navigator's Island, 230. 

New Poems by Christina G. 

Rossetti, 169. 
New Zealand, 230. 
" News from Nowhere," 52, 77, 

78. 
North American Review, 204. 
North British Review, 95. 
Norton, Charles Eliot, 204. 

" Ode to the Nightingale," 100. 

Odyssey of Homer, 73. 

" Ogier the Dane," 69. 

" Old Poets, Conversations on 
Some of the," 190. 

Oliphant, Mrs., 42. 

" Ordered South," 227. 

Ormond Yard, 65. 

Osborne, Mrs. Fanny, 231. 

Ouida, 42. 

Ovid, 151. 

Oxford, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62. 

Oxford and Cambridge Maga- 
zine, 58. 

" Palace of Art," 23. 
Palgrave, F. T., 10. 
"Paradise, The Earthly," 68, 

7 1 ' 74* 
Parliament (English), 186. 
11 Peace and War, 1 ' 143. 
Poe, Edgar A., 8, 153, 155, 199. 
" Poems by the Way," 74. 
" Poems by Two Brothers," 15. 
"Poems, Chiefly Lyrical," 21. 
Portobello, 227, 228. 
Prayer, 35. 

Preraphaehtes, 54, 151, 152, 160. 
Prince Albert, 20. 
" Princess, The, ' 29, 40. 
" Prince Otto," 215. 
" Promise of May, ' 39. 
"Proud King, The," 68. 
"Pygmalion and the Image," 

69, 70. 
Pym, 184. 



INDEX 



249 



Quarterly Review, 23, 24, 92, 93, 

94,95, in. 
" Queen Anne Architecture, 62. 
Queen Elizabeth's Lodge, 53. 
" Queene, The Faerie," 91. 
Quickly, Dame, 227. 
Quiller-Couch, A. T., 244. 

Raphael, 107. 

" Raven, The," 153. 

Reade, 115, 125. 

Red House, The, 62, 64. 

Reynolds, J. K., 106. 

Rice, S. S., 19. 

14 Ring Given to Venus, The," 69. 

Rogers, Samuel, 10. 

" Roi the Fool, The Tale of," 72. 

Roman Catholicism, 33. 

"Romola," 42, 128, 131, 143. 

" Roots of the Mountains, The," 

7 S - 
Rossetti, Christina G., 149, 150, 

164, 166 et seq. 
Rossetti, Dante G., 56, 58, 62, 71, 

149 et seq., 211. 
Rossetti, Gabriele, 150. 
Rossetti, Maria, 150. 
Rossetti, William Michael, 149, 

156, 164, 169. 
Rouen, 55. 
Roundheads, 184. 
Rubinstein, 219. 
Ruskin, John, 58, 138, 152. 

" Sad Fortunes of Rev. Amos 

Barton, The," 123. 
"Saga of Gunnlaug," etc., 72. 
Saintsbury, Mr., 67. 
Sallust, 151. 
Samoa, 242, 244. 
San Francisco, 232, 240. 
Sand, George, 132. 
Saranac Lake, 237. 
Sarasate, 219. 
Savonarola, 128, 129. 
"Scenes of Clerical Life," 42, 

118, 122, 123, 132, 140. 
Schiller, 90, 101, 105, 212. 
Scott, Bell, 58. 
Scott, Walter, 53, 115, 125. 
Selden, 184. 

Sellwood, Emily, 10, 27, 28, 29. 
Sermon on the Mount, 34. 
Severn, 101, 111. 



Shackford, W. H., 178, 180. 
Shakespeare, 117, 119. 
Shelley, 88, 92, 95, 96, 112, 155. 
Shelley's poems, 20. 
Shorthouse, J. H., 42. 
Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor, 160, 

161. 
Sidney, 184. 
"Sigurd the Volsung, The Story 

. °?," 73- 

' Silas Marner, 42, 128. 
" Silverado Squatters, The," 236. 
Simpson, Sir Walter, 230. 
Skerryvore, 236. 
Socialism of Morris, 74. 
Socrates, 107. 
" Son of Croesus, The," 69. 
Son of Man, 34. 
" Sonnets from the Portuguese," 

_ 159- 

Sorrel, Hetty, 135. 

South Sea Islands, 230, 240. 

" Spanish Gypsy, The," 137. 

Spectator, 10, 45, 217. 

Spedding, James, 10, 19, 39. 

Spencer, Herbert, 117, 118. 

Spencer, Hon. W. R., 91. 

Spenser, 88, 91, 179. 

" St. Ives," 244. 

St. John, 34. 

Stephen, Leslie, 229, 230. 

Stephens, 152. 

Stevenson, Robert, 220. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 41, 125, 

175, 211 et seq. 
Stevenson, Thomas, 220. 
"Story of Rhodope, The," 69. 
" Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and 

Mr. Hyde, The," 237. 
Strauss, 117. 

"Sundering Flood, The," 79. 
Swift, Dean, 175. 
Swinburne, Algernon C, 61, 67, 

163. 
Switzerland, 219, 236. 
Sydney, 242, 243. 
Symons, Arthur, 59. 

" Talking Oak, The," 43. 
Taylor, Henry, 10. 
Tennant, 19, 21. 
Tennyson, Alfred, 7 et seq., 56, 
Tennyson, Charles, 27. 
Tennyson, Emily, 22. 



250 



INDEX 



Tennyson, Rev. George Clay 

ton, 15. 
Tennyson, Hallam, 12. 
Tennyson, Lionel, 37. 
Thackeray, W. M., 11, 115, 125 

138, 145. 
" Theophrastus Such," 128. 
Theydons, 52. 
Thomson, 19, 21. 
Thoreau, 182. 
"Thorstein Staffsmitten, The 

Tale of," 72. 
Ticknor, 204. 
Tom Jones," 143. 
" Travels with a Donkey," 231. 
" Treasure Island," 236. 
Trench, Archbishop of London, 

19. 
Trinity College, 19. 
Trollope, 115, 125. 
Tudor House, 163. 
Tunbridge Wells, 27. 
Tusitala, 243. 
" Two Voices, The," 26. 
Tyndall, John, 10, 37, 38, 40. 

*' Ulysses," 47. 

University of Edinburgh, 236. 

Vailima, 242. 

Vallance, Aymer, 54. 

" Vastness, poem, 38. 

Vaughan, 155. 

Venables, G. S., 10. 

Vergil, 151, 179. 

"Viglund the Fair, The Story 

of," 72. 
*' Vision of Sin, The," 47. 
" Vision of Sir Launfal, 191. 
Vivisection, 45. 
" Volsung Saga," 72. 



Walthamstow, 52. 

Walton, Izaak, 52. 

Wansted, 52. 

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 140. 

Washington, 176. 

"Watching of the Falcon, The," 

69. 
"Water of the Wondrous Isles, 

The," 79. 
Watertown, 189. 
Watts, G. F., 10. 

Weary in Well Doing," 169. 
Webster, 185. 
Wegg, Captain, 138. 

Weir of Hermiston," 220, 243, 

244. 
" Well at the World's End, The," 

Wellington, Duke of, 32. 

Westminster Review, 117. 

Weyman, S. J., 125. 

"When I am Dead, My Dear- 
est," poem, 168. 

White, Maria, 189, 190, 192. 

White, W. A., 189. 

Whitman, Walt, 32, 156. 

Williams, D. H., 192. 

Windermere, 105. 

"Wood Beyond the World, 
The," 78. 

Woodford, 52. 

Woodstock, 51. 

Woolner, Thomas, 10, 152. 

Wordsworth, 9, 29, 40, 42. 

"Writing on the Image, The," 
69. 

'' Year's Life, A," 190. 

Zoilus, in. 
Zola, 40. 



mov e kcj 



NOV 5 1901 



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013 137 714 9 










